Letter: Ashamed to be thought an NHS fat cat Dangers of health service driven by profit

Nicholas Timmins' headline "Health industry breeds fat cats" (1 September) says it all. Privatisation of medicine leads to an industry run by people whose principal objective is to make themselves rich, rather than a service run by people with less selfish motives.

In 1948 I, like many other doctors, welcomed the National Health Service; it freed us from concern about the financial status of our patients, and enabled us to provide the same standards of treatment for all of them. Our satisfaction came from the feeling that we were doing good. We were paid enough to live on and bring up our families, and we had no ambition to be stinking rich.

I am now long retired; but if I were not, I hope I would resist the inducements to become dependent upon the world of private medicine insidiously laid before doctors by successive so-called "reforms" in the NHS. I would be ashamed even by the possibility of being thought a fat cat.

J G Scadding

Beaconsfield, Bucks