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Why we need NHS
YES, you bet we’re scared, Dr Richard Smith (Fury at ‘NHS fears profit’ diagnosis, July 11). We’re scared of having a health service that offers only the most basic treatment to half of its population – about 49 million Americans have no health insurance cover. Pensioners have to pay higher contributions, based on the insurance principle that they are higher-risk patients. If you lose your job, you lose your health insurance perk, and we are living through a global financial crisis resulting in thousands of redundancies. America prefers to put huge amounts of money into TV hospital soaps, which bear little relation to reality, and which glamourise its health service.
Far away, American shareholders cannot possibly understand what the NHS means to British people. The difficulty with managing and planning for healthcare is that no one person can feel another's pain. I wonder how many of these managers and politicians have private healthcare plans? Or do they just rely on their “old boy” networks to get them quick and high-level care when needed?
Is it commonly known that the Department of Health has a special section, staffed by about 60 people, advising on involving private companies in healthcare? So, when Alan Johnson, our health minister, says Nye Bevan wanted health centres all over the country, and equates them with polyclinics, he is deceiving us (Polyclincs part of Nye’s plan, says minister, July 11). The NHS is the antithesis of private health businesses. It was set up because the national insurance system which pre-dated it had failed.
Dr Smith had the effrontery to say: “What does it matter if the surplus goes into the Whittington mess fund, or into New York Stock Exchange?” How little he understands our system and our support for it. I suggest he asks some of the British mothers, children, disabled, elderly and chronically sick people whom he so contemptuously disregards why it matters to them.
Sheila Patton
NW5
THANK you for reporting so fully the deplorable outburst at Whittington Hospital by the capitalist from the United Health Group, who said: “What does it matter if the surplus goes into the Whittington mess fund or into the New York stock exchange?” It makes me even more certain that we are right to support with our taxes the not-for-profit principles of the NHS.
What really disturbs me is the extent to which our major parties have gone along with this American nonsense. The Greens are the only party to have consistently opposed the internal market.
John Collins
St Albans Road, NW5
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