May I suggest to Barry Tempest (Letters, January 16), in his reply to my comments regarding the NHS, that it might be a better use of his time before he heads off to find a tape measure to lambast me for taking ‘nine column inches’ to relate my criticisms of the NHS - that he stopped moaning on about my lack of a ‘verifiable substantive argument’.

Because it appears that Mr Tempest missed the essential thrust of my points - maybe because he was far more interested in column inches, than in what I was trying to highlight?

Anyhow, ‘international comparisons for cost-effectiveness’ is, I believe, so far as the NHS is concerned, mired in myth and what a person wishes to believe rather than what is actual reality.

And my suggestion that private health provision would be cheaper to provide than what the NHS provides is arrived at by doing simple maths.

No need for complicated calculus. When it comes to balancing the books which, at the NHS, there is a desperate need to do so, this particular regimen is partially ignored or is not robust enough, because there are always lots of people who thing wrongly, that a never ending pile of tax-payers cash will solve all the ills of the NHS. It won’t.

Well, no one would suggest that to cure an alcoholic, it would be a great idea to ply them with a never ending supply of alcohol.

And it’s not a case of a ‘privileged few’ who can afford to access private health care. For the NHS, it’s about financial rigour, cutting out the ‘dead wood’, cutting waste, ending the practice of tax-payers funding expensive and fashionable surgery and so on.

Trouble is, no one wants to face the truth. No one wants to kill the ‘sacred cow’ popularly known as the NHS.

Not politicians, nor many of those who work within it. Yes, ‘quality comes at a cost’. But in many instances, quality in the NHS is more to do with luck and nursing professionalism etc, than the amount of cash being thrown at it.

Lastly, the US abandoned a national health care system because they saw what we in the UK still refuse to admit.

A so-called total free health service is a short route to financial disaster. It is a money pit with no end in sight.

Again, the experiment has failed in its present guise.

ANDREW MARTIN
Kitchener Road
Weymouth