Letter to the Editor: To continue my response to Patrick Loxdale’s comments about Patrick O’Brien’s criticism of Liz Truss (Letters, Cambrian News, 26 October),  he exhorts us “to get our facts right” and recognise that the National Health Service can’t cope because “we all think it is free”, as if not having to worry about medical bills was an abdication of responsibility.

I am reminded of the final column of my daily paper’s American correspondent, who, as he described the good and bad of American society, said that people did drive into the parking lot of a hospital and die in their car because they did not have medical insurance.

I also recall in A Very Private Diary of a nurse in wartime, Mary Morris, describing how she heard the screams in her street of a neighbour dying in pain from cancer.

In 1948, at age six, my mother took me to the cottage hospital to have my little toe strapped straight, and at age 80 I have only recently realised it was when the NHS was established. When I was a baby my mother could not afford to have my little toe straightened.

Most ordinary people realise that taxes pay for the NHS, but there are sections of society that view the NHS as ripe for ‘free pickings’. I remember a letter in my daily paper that described the substantial number of Members of Parliament and Lords who have investments in private medical companies, hedging their bets as it were, and the writer said that if that didn’t make the reader angry then nothing would.

Covid Test and Trace appointed Dido Harding, a baroness, unlawfully, and without a medical background, to run an unsuccessful, private company that wasted billions, rather than employ the medical expertise of the NHS. Let us say no more about the PPE cronies, yet more billions wasted on free pickings!

If the Tories had not eviscerated the NHS with austerity, the same failed medicine as for 1929, we would have been much better prepared for Covid. 25,000 beds have been lost since 2010!

Roger Louvet,

Porthmadog