Free for All

It seems to me that taxation is a kind of unwritten agreement between me and the politicians. I agree to give the money and in return they give me and mine with all the sorts of stuff that can only be provided by pooling my money with every other citizen's money. Our A&E services are available free to anyone who really needs them and this is a very good thing. I wouldn't want it any other way. GP services are another matter entirely.
GPs are there to provide the basic support for our residents in the management of their healthcare and to help them when they need medical help. It's "free" but only to the individual. The NHS bill in our borough alone is well over a billion pounds a year. That's funded by our taxes (I actually wish people would call it "paid for"). As I said, I am happy that they use some of my money to provide emergency medical services to anyone in need. I am less than happy that these same politicans seem quite happy to provide the full range of NHS benefits to anyone that walks up to the counter and asks for them.
Before you jump to label me some sort of fascist, racist uncaring hard-hearted xenophobe, let me acknowledge that if someone is in our country and is unwell, I am glad that we are compassionate enough to ensure that they are treated.
I am a relative newcomer to the NHS - I'm over half way through my fourth year. I work in a GP practice that is popular with most of its patients and our GPs are an amazingly dedicated bunch of extraordinarily nice people. From my perspective, our patients are really fortunate in healthcare terms to be living in our neck of the woods. When I first started working for them, I found it almost impossible to comprehend how easy it was for anybody, and I really mean anybody, to obtain NHS care from them. There is no working system that checks to see if a person is entitled to NHS care. I found it incredible at the start and still do.
The only real determinant of entitlement is whether or not the applicant is "ordinarily resident". This is a common law term which is the Government explains: "The term “ordinarily resident” is not defined, but its established meaning is that a person is ordinarily resident if they are normally residing in the United Kingdom (apart from temporary or occasional absences), and their residence here has been adopted voluntarily and for settled purposes as part of the regular order of their life for the time being."
In other words, you can turn up at our reception and say that you have come here voluntarily and for settled purposes etc. Nowhere does it say that you are entitled to live here. Nowhere does it say that you have to work, pay taxes, be a citizen of the European Union.
It didn't seem fair to me then and doesn't feel fair now. I know that we register "medical tourists" all the time. We provide NHS prescriptions for people with long-term chronic conditions who have arrived to stay with relatives or friends and who have no medication and no medical insurance. All they have to say is that they have come to live here. I am not allowed to check their immigration status and I have no way of checking their entitlement. Health service regulations on the subject provide complete "decision tree" guidance at the bottom of which is "if the person still appears not be entitled, the person can still be registered at the GP's discretion". In these litigious times, witholding medical treatment can be ruinous to a GPs bank balance so the medical insurers tell us to register them.
The upshot is that if you can get through immigration at Heathrow, you will get "paid for" NHS care. It's as simple as that whatever the government might say otherwise.