Sharing burden down the ages

PAT Rhodes (Yorkshire Post, September 28) is wrong to 
say that today’s retired people have bankrolled today’s NHS. Yes, they paid their taxes when they were working, but that funded the NHS of yesteryear 
and did not endow the NHS for the future.

Our ageing population means that today’s young working people will have to contribute more in taxes to fund their grandparents’ and parents’ NHS treatment.

In my view, this is reasonable, and we should be grateful as a population for better health 
in retirement; but many 
younger people ask why the population is not equally 
grateful for the shared benefits 
of good education – why is 
society making today’s 
teenagers pay to go to 
university?

Telephone tantrums

From: John Gordon, Whitcliffe Lane, Ripon.

LIFE was much simpler 50 years ago. When you phoned your insurance company, a nice young woman put you through to the right department.

Now you get five options 
and you have to decide which button to press, but by the 
time you have heard the fifth option, you have forgotten what the first option was about, so you dial again to try to get it right. In doing so, you have spent your money and your time, yours not theirs.

The telephone engineer 
who designed this system probably thought he was 
making life simpler but in fact 
he was making the whole 
process far more complex; none of which improves the customer’s temper.