NHS isn’t the best

We are told our NHS is the “envy of the world”, yet I lived in the US and travelled the advanced world for over half a century and never heard anyone express similar comments.

As a Franco-Scot married to an Anglo-Swede, family experience leaves me in doubt that at least the German, Swiss, French and Scandinavian medical systems are better than ours. The sad fact is that anti-privatisation dogma here has reached such realms of lunacy that even if it is clearly in the patients’ interest, it must be rejected on ideological grounds.

What other nations do admire is our independent school system, and world-class institutions need to be free of the state’s dead hand and allowed to charge the people who use them.

They need market discipline and the role of the state is to redistribute income so everyone has the means to pay for such services, even if in some cases it is only a token amount.

DR JOHN CAMERON

Howard Place

St Andrews