Physicians, I feel your pain

Doctors are right to be furious about their pensions. But a home visit wouldn't kill them
Dr Finlay
Happier times: Barbara Mullen, Andrew Cruickshank and Bill Simpson in Dr Finlay's Casebook. Photograph: L. Trievnor/Getty Images

For the last couple of weeks, I've been inundated with nice messages from doctors. "Thanks, thanks!" they email. "Hurray!" they tweet. There's so much medical benevolence coming my way, it's really a shame I'm not ill.

The sawbones are smiling because I stuck up for them on Question Time. They've been on the end of so much nastiness lately, I think they're relieved that somebody still loves them.

Everyone says the strike-threatening doctors face a "sympathy problem" and they do – but not for the reasons generally given. At least, I hope not. If we are cross about "greed", we need to wake up and smell the Rohypnol.

Let's get some fallacies out of the way.

The government is not "curbing spending" on doctors' pensions. That suggests the medical pension scheme was running at a loss; in fact, it was perfectly self-sufficient. This isn't a cutback, it's a raid.

Andrew Lansley said: "People know that pension reform is needed because people live longer."

That's not why pension reform is needed. We've known for years that people are living longer – doctors know that better than anyone – and pension contributions were put in accordingly. Unfortunately, successive governments spent that money on other things. Ignoring statistics for life expectancy, blind to forthcoming trouble, they failed to ring-fence pension funds for their proper purpose. It was a Ponzi scheme.

It was exactly that kind of live-in-the-now, credit-card attitude, from governments everywhere, that triggered the recession. They'd planned to pay back the "borrowed" pensions with new money that slid down the magic beanstalk. Now, staring in bafflement at a handful of dead leaves, they want to cover their arses by going back and nicking some more.

They are busting a gut to persuade us that we're "all in it together" and that any public sector workers who choke at longer hours or slashed wages are "greedy" and "not team players".

But they weren't "greedy" 10 years ago, were they? They worked and they got paid. They only became "greedy" after our masters had sold off the gold reserves, borrowed fantasy amounts with fantasy collateral, allowed the banks to gamble with it, watched them lose and lose until the creditors came calling, bailed them out with more of our money, then sat back as it was paid out in bonuses to people who had too many yachts already.

And somehow, the moral is that doctors and teachers and train drivers are "greedy", simply for wanting to live as they did before. God knows we were treated like idiots all along – but if we buy this new propaganda, we deserve no better.

Last fallacy: that there will be no sympathy because this isn't about patient care. Yes it is. Doctors are now being asked to work until they're 68. With the long hours and intense concentration required, how old do you really want your doctor to be? What if a medic had to work until 85 to balance the books; are you still happy for that guy to do your hip replacement?

No disrespect to old folk; you don't want them too young, either. The ideal doctor, like the ideal pilot, is about 50. But forcing them to Zimmer round the wards until they drop is obviously connected to patient care.

I really, really hope we know all this. Despite the massive propaganda effort, I hope none of us truly believes that doctors are greedy, or unrealistic, or undeserving of a comfortable and timely retirement.

Nope; I think the sympathy problem is entirely because people are cross with their GPs. Many of us have no other contact with the medical profession. The sympathy gap cracks open, in both directions, when we fall ill on a weekend and can only get a voicemail with a phone number for NHS Direct. When we're doubled up with stomach pains at midnight, given a choice between dialling 999 or getting ourselves to a "walk-in clinic" on the other side of town. And when we remember being children, visited at home by the kindly local doc.

And when we can't get drugs.

Here's an experience I share with many women. When I turned 35, my surgery stopped allowing me prescriptions for the contraceptive pill because I smoke and this puts me on a cardiovascular "danger graph".

They won't accept that I'm happy to take on the risk – negligible compared to the real danger in my family (lung cancer). I offered to sign a form relieving them of any legal responsibility; no dice. And no pill either.

Ask yourselves, doctors: if you had to consult officials before buying a car, who said you weren't allowed one because it increased your chances of driving into a tree, how happy would you be to pay tax for that service? There's your sympathy problem, right there.

We can only imagine what hell must be suffered by the terminally ill who are denied access to the potions (not invented by doctors, but guarded by them) which could gently end their trauma.

So, here's my solution to everything. Let pharmacists allocate drugs, as well as selling them. Make it impossible to sue over any side effects from taking them wrongly (which is, surely, the doctors' fear). Treat people like adults: tell them the risks, show them the instructions, let them overdose if they want to.

Then, make GPs (now free to concentrate on diagnosis and referral) available for home visits again. Do that and, I promise, there will be no more "public sympathy problem".

But the government should leave their pensions alone. It's a raid, not a saving, and these are people who train for seven years to spend their lives in the valley of the shadow of death. Look down the back of someone else's sofa.