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.
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Hide AdIn 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.