On the contrary, the fact that a man falls on hard times, and then falls ill, but cannot be treated because he is poor shows that the capitalist system is fundamentally flawed.

I agree there are some people who are unwilling to make sensible provision for their life, and I can understand the argument that they should be made to take the consequences of their stupidity, but such people are few and far between. There are many many more who deserve our help and who would be just as willing to help if they could. Your system condemns them, perhaps to death. A state healthcare system would not.

Furthermore, who is to say who is a scrounger and who is deserving? How can you tell?

When you consider that countries like France, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all have state sponsored healthcare systems where treatment is available for all, I repudiate the suggestion that universal health care is something only to be found under "socialism".

What I want to know is, why you are so mean-minded that you would prefer to let people suffer rather than pool your resources with everyone else to ensure that everyone, good or bad, wealthy or poor, holy or evil, black or white, you or anybody else, can be given the best available treatment when they need it.

No-one - not even drug addicts, benefit cheats or people of a lower social class than yours - wants to have cancer, or to have to deliver their own baby in a squalid hovel, or to cauterise a stump after losing a limb on their own. Would you turn them away from hospital becasue they don't have the right medical subscription? Suppose your car left the road ploughed into a hedge under which a homeless person was sleeping. Should you be treated for your cuts and bruises while the vagabond lies in his own blood and piss, limbs crushed and body racked with unrelieved pain, simply because he didn't make sensible provision for his future?

Have you ever read a Charles Dickens book?

As for the doctor losing his freedom to choose on religious grounds whether to perform an abortion or not, at least it restores the woman's right to choose on pragmatic grounds whether to become a mother or not, without receiving a lecture on the doctor's idea of what is right or wrong, or to be told she is a harlot and the spawn of the Devil. I would bet that her choice is more valid than the quack's.

So far, you have failed signally to convince me that I would be better off making my own provision for healthcare, than I am belonging to the National Health Service.