Welcome to the DeliPod with me, James DeliPod. I know I always say I'm excited about the

sweet special guest but I am absolutely dying to hear what Ben Rubin has to tell me about

all sorts of interesting things. I just put it in context. Ben sent me a very intriguing email

which I completely ignored for about a month, wasn't it Ben or something, or I just get

led to stuff. You're a busy man James. I'm a busy man and then I read it and I thought this looks

like a really good story and it's the kind of ordinary person who believes in the system

mugged by reality and suddenly discovers how deep the rabbit hole goes. Is that sort of a fair

summary? Yes, yeah I'd say so. So before we go on, I, I don't know about you but I've always had

this suspicion about the cult of the NHS. There are various things that have puzzled me about it

for years, even when I was a normal, even when I didn't really understand how deep the rabbit hole

went. And there were things that didn't make sense. For example, I never understood the imperative

of getting an NHS supercomputer which seemed to cost gazillions of pounds, of taxpayer pounds,

to no useful purpose. And there were things that puzzled me like it was,

because whenever a journalist even was prepared to write an article critical of the NHS which

was very rare anyway, he would have to, or she would have to sort of genuflect and before the

ultra of the NHS and make the cross-signs by explaining how wonderful the nurses were and

how marvelous it had been when their mum had breast cancer. And all these preambles before saying

but actually I had a bad experience and I'm a bit worried that it's less than perfect.

And I've always looked at the NHS and thought, hang on, this is a sort of Stalinist healthcare

system, a sort of legacy from the years after the Second World War, created by socialists

on a model that is no longer any use to the world if it ever was. And we keep telling ourselves

it's the envy of the world and actually it's an embarrassment, it's a national embarrassment

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