I READ with horror in today’s press about BUPA paying their customers to use the NHS for heart cancer and obstetrics treatment up to £2,000 each, rather than going to their private hospitals. Surely this is fraud; they are charging their customers for private health care, and cheating the taxpayers into subsidising their vast profits.

It’s time to end this theft from taxpayers. Surely the remedy is simple: don’t treat anyone with private health care insurance ahead of NHS patients, make them go on the waiting list, or abolish private medicine altogether.

That was the one mistake when the NHS was founded. If these people weren’t allowed to rob the NHS it would be possible to treat far more people and give the nurses and underpaid staff the decent rise which they richly deserve.

Ann Poyser Stockton Road Newport