£2.8 bn is the cost to the British National Health Service of treating visitors:  students, workers on visas, tourists, immigrants, expats popping back to see their old GP and, yes, “health tourists”.

But the deliberate exploitation of the NHS by the un-entitled is estimated to be about £200m a year, which is a lot less than nearly £2bn. There are arrangements to reclaim those costs, and a while ago the government announced it would also be adding a sort of NHS levy to visas to try and recoup more of this cash.

My wife and I  get medical treatment in London as private patients and claim on insurance.  The waiting room of my London doctor’s practice is like the United Nations,  full of people from all over the world, including heavily pregnant women from the Middle East, for whom medical care appears to be “free”, no questions asked. My personal guess is that £200m a year is just that, a guess.

The difference between the EU and, say Saudi Arabia, is that if you are British and get ill in Italy or Germany there are reciprocal arrangements and treatment is free. If you go to Saudi Arabia you need your credit card – and a healthy bank account. At least, that is what I discovered when I went there. Probably, the number of women arriving in Britain to have their babies at no financial cost is exaggerated; it is nonetheless un-Epicurean in so far as it is exploitative and unfair to the taxpayer.