Video: Jeremy Hunt: NHS 'could recover £500m' from foreign care The NHS could claw back more than £500 million a year if it was better at charging foreign nationals for using NHS services, a report suggests. The health service could raise the cash - which is the equivalent of 0.45 per cent of its annual budget - by deterring so-called "health tourists," recovering care charges from overseas visitors and charging temporary migrants for accessing NHS care, the report found. Health tourists - such as women who travel to the UK in late pregnancy and give birth in an NHS hospital before returning home - cost the health service at least £70 million each year, according to the study on migrant access to NHS care in England. Experts have previously raised concerns about the escalating costs of health tourism particularly across maternity services, oncology, HIV services, infertility and in the treatment of renal failure. But a recent European Commission report concluded that so-called benefits tourism was "neither widespread nor systematic."