Nigel Farage says the "national health service has become the international health service" and adds cuts should be made.
Nigel Farage has said UKIP would weed out all foreign NHS workers who "cannot speak English properly".
The UKIP leader said doctors and nurses who had not mastered the language should not be given jobs in the health service in the first place.
And he added it was "scandalous" that Britain was not training enough doctors and nurses to take up the roles.
In a wide-ranging interview on Sky News' Murnaghan programme, Mr Farage also said UKIP would make cuts in the NHS and pinpointed "middle management" as a key target.
He also said those travelling to the UK would be required to have private medical insurance before being allowed in because "we have allowed the national health service to become the international health service".
When asked by Sky's Dermot Murnaghan if he would "winnow out" all NHS workers who could not "speak English properly".
He replied: "Well of course. Don't we want to live in a country where we speak the same language and isn't it scandalous that we are not training enough nurses and doctors in our own country?
"I don't know about you, whether you have even been to a GP who doesn’t speak very good English, but it's something that people out there are talking about."
It is estimated that around 11% of the 1.3m workers in the NHS are not British born, which means UKIP's plans could potentially see as many as 130,000 sacked from the health service.
Mr Farage said: "If people don't speak English and they are dealing with English-speaking patients surely they shouldn't be employed in the first place."
The UKIP leader said there was no question the cost of the NHS would grow because of the increasing population but added there were clearly savings to be made.
He highlighted the growth of middle management roles, which he said had increased by 48% since 1997 and said he would be giving a series of speeches to lay out UKIP's NHS plans.
Mr Farage also said in it was "unlikely that UKIP would want to be in coalition with anybody" in the event of a hung parliament after May's General Election.
He accused both Labour and the Tories of failing to address the "number one issue" of immigration and said Mr Cameron's offer of a referendum on membership of the EU in 2017 wasn't good enough.
He said Mr Cameron had made it clear he did not like UKIP but said he "tries to sound a little bit like us".
Sky News
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