Health is an area where the gains of one would not normally come at the detriment of others. If one person is cured, it does not usually involve another person becoming ill. As society becomes wealthier and better educated, most of its members ought to have access to better health and greater longevity, without impeding the ability of others to do likewise.

Alas, the NHS has changed that. Given its universal provision and its necessarily finite resources, decisions have to be made about which treatments and procedures can be afforded and which cannot. In a recent case a leukemia sufferer was denied access to a possibly life-prolonging drug because the NHS regarded the £30,000 a year cost as an ineffective use of resources, given likely clinical outcomes.

The point is that within a closed system of finite resources, each treatment has to be assessed to see if it is worth denying funding to other treatments in order to supply it. Television reporters interview someone demanding extraordinary (and very costly) treatments for their brain-damaged premature baby, without ever alluding to the brutal fact that others must die if it is to be kept alive. In the NHS people have to ask if that extended life is worth more than the ten kidney patients who might otherwise have been saved. They have to ask if a drug which might offer a few extra years to one patient is worth the suffering to dozens of elderly patients who will not receive their hip replacements if the money is spent elsewhere.

The NHS has turned health into a zero sum game, in which the survival of some takes place at the expense of the death or suffering of others. The QALY, or quality-adjusted life year, was devised to facilitate these complex, and some would say repugnant, calculations. Many people also blanch at the way the NHS can withdraw all treatment if people obtain privately the drugs the NHS has refused to allocate to them. Gods might behave like this, but men and women shouldn't.

There has to be a better way, and it might involve encouraging charities and communities to rally round people who lose out on NHS allocations, and raise extra funds to support them. That breaks out of the fixed pie of the zero sum game, and brings in additional resources instead of taking them at the expense of others.