A NATIONAL newspaper last weekend promoted a Reader Offer. Not a coffee mug imprinted with a front page of the said newspaper. Not a pair of cotton sheets, nor a cut-price wining and dining treat.

A headline across five columns spelt out the goody: “Getting seen fast by a specialist.” A sub headline was more specific: “Avoid long NHS waiting lists by fast-tracking your way to better health.”

The text quickly played on anxiety about our personal health. “Feeling unwell can be stressful enough without having to wait for appointments or tests. Unfortunately, current NHS waiting lists mean that it is not always easy to be seen quickly.”

The advantages of taking out the private medical insurance promoted by the offer were illustrated by the experience of a (named) 50-year-old woman, who went to her doctor with hip pain.

Unaware she had private insurance he told her “he could refer me to a specialist but didn’t know how long I’d wait for an appointment”. However, learning of her medical insurance he immediately set the fast-tracking wheels in progress.

The woman received a call the next day, and by the weekend she had been examined by a consultant, who told her she needed a new hip. There and then he booked her for surgery, which took place within weeks, perhaps even days.

Though vague on this point, the promotion nevertheless hammers home a few extra benefits of the private health care. Not just your own room, “usually with en-suite bathroom”, but also “access to all the latest licensed drugs and proven treatments, which may not be routinely available on the NHS.

Is this not a matter for our shame? The NHS is this nation’s finest achievement. That’s why every main political party swears unqualified commitment to it, though usually, when in power, presiding over its further decline, even its steady dismantlement.

The original vision of the NHS allowed for no private health care. Consultants dug in their heels. To bring them on side, Labour’s Aneurin Bevan, chief architect of the NHS, famously – or infamously - “stuffed their mouths with gold” and allowed private practice to continue.

For decades this didn’t matter. With care as good as any available on the NHS, private health care retreated to the margins. But it’s now back with a vengeance. The canker is growing. Equality in health care is shrinking to the most chronic conditions – cancer, heart disease and such.

So is it okay for the speed and quality of treatment of all else to be governed by the patient’s readiness to pay? No. Not every non-life-threatening ailment is also minor and/or pain free. And for most people, the choice of paying for superior health care does not exist, to say nothing of objections in principle. The level playing field is the only way.

SUPERB dancer of course. Commands all the moves. But Darcey Bussell gives a flat-footed performance in offering advice to those who would emulate her success. She says it takes “years of guts, sweat and tears”. You’d have to be very thick not to know that, or the vital role of another of Darcey’s keys to top-rank success - “being in the right place at the right time”. That’s life.