So good they said it twice

A sentence that popped up in the gummint's lists of feeble excuses for neither having a referendum on EU membership nor a cost-benefit analysis thereof (posted here) was this:

'Our membership allows us to live, work and travel across Europe and to receive free medical care if we fall sick on holiday'.

OK. Let's look at that 'holiday' bit, let's take Spain for example. According to FCO statistics, we made 17 million visits to Spain and there were 695 hospital admissions that required consular assistance (the total figure may have been higher, but let's run with that).

Let's assume an average Brit on holiday in Spain for a week spends £300, so British tourists benefit the Spanish economy to the tune of £5,100 million. Let's also assume that an average hospital admission costs the Spanish health service £1,500 (one-and-a-half times as much as an average NHS admission), so those 695 admissions cost the Spanish health service £1 million in total, or 0.02% of the total gain to the Spanish economy.

Spain could, in principle, end this and demand that people paid their own hospital costs in full (in which case very few would dare go), or demand that people take out travel health insurance. Let's assume that this costs £10 per person and is paid to a UK insurance company. This would cut people's limited holiday budgets by £10 per person, so the total amount spent in Spain would drop from £5,100 million to £4,930 million, but the Spanish health service would collect an extra £1 million from UK insurers, boosting the overall income to a whopping £4,931 million, an overall shortfall of ... er ...£169 million.

So really this has little to do with the EU - Spain has every interest in offering free emergency healthcare to tourists and would probably continue to offer it even if we left the EU, and no doubt we would offer a reciprocal arrangement to Spanish tourists over here.