Anyone can cherry pick figures and quote them out of context to try and justify an ill-informed opinion.

I have worked in the US where charities originally set up to provide third world medical aid have reorganised their efforts stateside as they found more need there among US citizens who couldn’t afford health insurance and medication. We are not talking about just the poorest but increasingly about middle income families affected by the downturn who simply cannot afford essential medical treatment or accommodation.

Whatever the faults of our system its greatest strength is that the US nightmare scenario would never happen over here.

I would strongly suggest that you are careful what you wish for!

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[Every other free animal on this planet hunts and looks after their young and themselves with no help.]

Well, I keep hens Tom and if one isn’t up to scratch the others bully it to death and in a large poultry set up will actually eat the corpse.

We have plenty to learn from the animals really, don’t we?

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The letter writer tells us of the wonders of Germany, do they not when you are made unemployed in Germany pay you your old wage through benefits for at least a year?.

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Tom Williams, how often do you need to use the NHS, which you labaste – without any evident to back up such a generalised statement? Also, how much experience of the health service and AOKK (Allgemeine Ortskrankenkasse) have you had, in Germany?

I am a German speaker with experience of having worked and lived in both Germany and Austria. I also, as a British citizen, with a long-term medical condition from birth (genetically-inherited) rely heavily on NHS services for my treatment every month and have done so throughout my life. The NHS has looked after me faultlessly in all the main aspects of my care day to day – I talk from regular experience of using NHS services! Your comment is both cheap and generalised, so therefore worth treating with ‘a pinch of salt at best’, disdain at worst. Outlandish statements like yours, which we come to expect in the Daily Mail, just expose your ignorance. I do not work for the NHS, but value the care they have provided and know too that this includes care at Princess Royal Hospital and others in your neck of the woods.

Educate yourself first, before making such sweeping statements.

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The letter writer epitomises the ‘I’m all right Jack’ attitude that is so prevalent in our society.

The NHS and the welfare state are both things of which we should be enormously proud. They stem from a spirit of collective generosity which was very much the spirit of the nation in the aftermath of the Second World War, and which represents the true British character far better than the vile bigoted Nationalism which the nation had just spent 6 years ridding Europe of.

Against a background of shortages and austerity, and with a financial situation far worse than that we face now, the then Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, fought in his quiet and calm way, against much opposition from the establishment at the time, to set up the health and welfare safety net almost all of us have had reason to be grateful for over the years. If the letter writer has never needed these services, he should be pleased, not bitter and twisted as he seems.

There are those who abuse the system – there probably always will be, but their abuse pales into insignificance when compared to the tax loopholes exploited by the obscenely wealthy.

The current proposals to put much of the NHS into the control of the private businesses of GPs amount to a large scale privatisation of the service.

We shouldn’t fall into the tabloid trap of assuming that private is automatically better than public – to start with we have the private profit margin as a drain on the available resource, and we must look at other privatisations of essential public services for our examples: railtrack,who failed miserably; the privatised energy companies, who are now all in foreign ownership and seem to be profiteering from us all hand over fist; and numerous failed large-scale government IT programmes, previously done in-house, (largely successfully with consultancy support), but many of which have failed under the tenure of large multi-national IT companies, whilst more and more of the related jobs are shipped abroad or filled by lower-paid employees shipped in from elsewhere by these coporations – they boost their profits whilst we pick up the bill for those they discard.

We must value our NHS and our welfare state – we simply won’t realise what we’ve got until it’s gone

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This is a heartening set of responses to what has to be the comedy wing of the Conservatives.

Tom should avoid the NHS at all costs – please, do and save is money for those rest of us with common sense still who actually care for society and actually believe in helping each other.

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I’ll try again, since my previous comment hasn’t registered…

This letter is typical of the ‘I’m all right Jack’ mentality we see so much of today. Far from denigrating our NHS and welfsare state we have reason to be very proud of them.

Both were created at a time of great deprivation, in the aftermath of World War II, at a time when our financial situation was far worse that it is now in real terms.

During those years the country was on its knees financially, partly because of the cost of the recent war, partly because of the high cost of loans to be paid back to the US.

But in the midst of this, Clement Atlee, a quiet and otherwise unremarkable man in many respects, set about creating the NHS and our welfare state, giving the ordinary man in the street a level of personal security he’d never had before. This was vehemently opposed by the opposition and the establishment at the time, but Atlee pursued this dream to the benefit of us all.

The spirit of collective generosity that carried him through was very much borne out of the horrors of war, and such values demonstrate true British values so much better than the poisonous, small-minded Nationalism that all had fought so hard to rid Europe of in the preceding years.

There will always be those who look to abuse the system, but in reality their abuse is dwarfed by the amount of tax that goes unpaid by legal, but morally dubious tax avoidance schemes for the mega-wealthy.

We’re soon to see the large-scale privatisation of parts of our NHS, by allowing these services to be admintered via the private businesses that are GP practices.

If people really believe the tabloid myth that private is automatically better than public, I suggest they look at the facts:

Firstly there’s the inherent overhead of the profit margin to be considered.

Secondly, have we all forgotten Railtrack? What about the privatised gas and electricity companies who are now accused of profiteering at our expense?

And what about the gov’t IT projects that have failed – many of these used to be run ‘in house’ generally successfully with consultancy support.

Now many are staffed by staff brought in from cheaper points of supply, or the work is sent abroad where allowed, while UK-based staff are sacked. Is that not large corporations asset-stripping UK jobs? It might be effective for their profits, but it simply adds to the burden of the UK exchequer.

We need to protect our NHS and welfare state – we simply won’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone.

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