LETTERS Paying for health
Sir: Before advocating an insurance-based NHS (Leading article, 23 January), please think carefully — and take a look at the our European neighbours who have it. Yes, their systems give far better care to everyone. In Germany, if you are too fat or just jaded, your doctor will prescribe two weeks' Kur — a holiday with a slightly restricted diet in the Black Forest — and your employer is obliged to give you the time off. If your kidneys fail, you are given a machine, not subjected to tests as to whether your life is worth continuing with. Hospitals are clean, bright and efficient, not crumbling cockroach-ridden ruins. And you don't wait.
But, and it's a big 'but', this is financed partly by the state and mainly by so-called insurance. This is not like Bupa, where the sicker and older pay more and come up against limits. It is like an extra income tax, being based on your income. In France there is a huge contribution by the em- ployer too. The same system here would mean that everyone would find themselves paying, in effect, extra tax, and it would be about double current levels required for our NHS. And because it is a semi-private system, German health care soars in cost miles over the rate of inflation, as con- trasted to a government-controlled system like ours.
What right-wing politicians are trying to evoke when they talk of going over to insurance is a vision in which those who now pay Bupa will pay less, the improvi- dent proles who don't will get a poor-law- style system, with detailed public debate going on of the sort the British love: should they be allowed Heinz beans or should a cheaper brand be bought? Is there any point treating people who make them- selves ill by smoking? And so on. The cat-and-mouse game which the Brit- ish better-off love to play with their under- class is what is wanted, but it is the very Opposite of what an insurance-based NHS will deliver. An insurance-based system Will give you very good health care to all and all will pay, in effect, higher income tax to finance it. If Mrs Thatcher's suppor- ters scream now at paying for the NHS, how will they react when they are told to pay double? I can assure you that paying £3,000 a year in Germany is not less painful because it is called insurance than is paying £1,500 called income tax here!
George Stern
6 Eton Court, Shepherds Hill London N6
Previous page
