13 February 2021 • 12:02am
More than one in three ambulance staff have had Covid-19, most of them catching it while at work
Credit: Stefan Rousseau/PA
SIR – I admire the attempts by Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, to reform the NHS to make it more responsive to the risk of future pandemics. He seems, however, to have rejected the Tories’ 1944 mixed private-state plan, flagged up by Allister Heath (Comment, February 11).
This may be because we already have such an organisation. Local private hospitals have, for the second time in under a year, been taken over by the NHS, meaning that patients who have paid large premiums for private health cover cannot access what they have paid for.