Letters | 11 April 2013

Health tourists must pay

Sir: The extent of the use made by non-entitled patients from abroad (‘International Health Service’, 6 April) should come as no surprise. This increasing stream of information demonstrating the volume and variation will cause even louder gasps and shock.

The NHS is the standard-bearer of the politics of equality and, like all great collective institutions of the left, however altruistic, is fundamentally corrupt. The corruption is so insidious that only those inside gain insight after the collapse.

In the health service there are often concealed two or more levels of care with varying degrees of competence. When the ‘health tourist’ is forced into paying, they will seek out ‘the best’, which will now be found in the swelling private sector, leaving the NHS depleted, and open to increasing scrutiny by the public. What was once invisible now becomes visible.
Anthony Mitra FRCS
(Hospital consultant, retired)
By email

Wrong about the weather

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Tom Bower

Labour is destroying London’s nightlife

Sir: Matt Ridley (Diary, 6 April) bemoans the Met Office’s lack of success in longer-term forecasting and puts the blame on a computer algorithm predicated on an assumption of global warming. I’d like to offer an alternative theory. Could it be that the Met Office has changed its recruitment policy to favour economists?
Brendan Keelan
London SW1

Affordable opera

Sir: Steerpike (6 April) claims that a couple of cheap seats for the current Royal Opera production of Die Zauberflöte would set Iain Duncan Smith back £220. Not so — he could have had two for as little as £6 each. While it would be of little relevance to a man on such a tight budget, there are over 300 seats priced at £20 or less for the performances referred to by Steerpike, and over 950 priced at £50 or less. Were he willing to join those who choose to stand, Mr Duncan Smith would find another 124 places, all for under a tenner.