The NHS can’t be free to all if it is to provide high-quality care

SIR – As a trainee GP, I was taught that NHS care is founded on three pillars, providing a service that is of high quality, is comprehensive and is free at point of service.

I was also taught that this was an illusion, and that any two of the three pillars are achievable but not the third. When teaching this concept to GP registrars, I used an illustration of an optical illusion that seemed to show three pillars that faded into two as the eye traced along their length.

Alas, rationing and/or charging for services now seems inevitable if we are to protect the most important pillar – the quality of NHS services. Dr Michael Archer King’s Lynn, Norfolk

SIR – Jeremy Corbyn (Comment, August 7) makes some interesting points in his article about how he “would rescue our public services”.

He rightly describes the NHS internal market as pointless and expensive, costing “more than £3 billion per year”. This sum is roughly 3 per cent of the annual NHS budget.

In 2010, however, the Commons Health Select Committee noted that 14 per cent of the total NHS budget was spent on the transaction costs of the internal market. This figure is surely just as high now.

All three main political parties have at one time or another supported the idea of running the health service as a commercialised internal market. However, we should question the idea that hospitals or other “health providers” can sensibly be treated as commercial businesses competing with each other, rather than cooperating against the common foes of disease and suffering. R F Gunstone Rugby, Warwickshire

SIR – Christopher Booker (Review, August 7) describes the excellent services of Care UK, which runs his local NHS treatment centre. The service he received contrasts sharply with the almost daily failure of NHS hospitals to provide adequate care.

The time has surely come to overhaul the monolithic NHS. One way to do this would be to extend the work of private companies such as Care UK and ask them to take over the running of our hospitals.

This would be an outstanding initiative for Theresa May’s Government, and would result in better healthcare for the ordinary people she claims to be interested in. Ron Forrest Wells, Somerset

SIR – Mr Booker needs to understand how NHS funding of “private” hospitals works. Contrary to his assertions, the NHS commissioners pay the private provider exactly the same tariff rate paid to an NHS provider for the procedure.

Yes, private providers can take excess NHS capacity, but Mr Booker is wrong to suggest that they save the NHS budget “hundreds of millions of pounds a year”. Paul F Morris North Muskham, Nottinghamshire