Speaking on the Today programme, their business reporter did his best to put some heat into a cold December morning. ‘Despicable cartel like practices,’ he flamed, quite putting Humph and the rest of the gang in the shade, over OFT allegations that UK private healthcare providers have rigged the market. The lady from the OFT stayed cool, although she did concede that the performance of the market was ‘perhaps not optimal’. To Dr No, the turn of phrase made about as much sense as if NASA public relations had used the words to describe the performance of the space shuttle Challenger on its last fateful flight.
The OFT, Monitor’s big brother, have been investigating the £5 billion UK private healthcare market, and – provisionally – it does not like what it saw. Provisionally – no one’s sticking their neck out here – it found ‘a number of features that, individually or in combination, prevent, restrict or distort competition’ – or cartels and rigged markets to the rest of us. Private healthcare, it appears – provisionally, of course – to be not so much about stitching up patients with subcutaneous Dexon, as stitching them up financially, in a web of cartels, restrictions and misinformation. The OFT plans – provisionally, as they don’t jump guns at the OFT – to refer the market to the Competition Commission.
Ian Hislop spent much of last night’s Have I Got News for You looking like un lapin apeuré caught in the headlights. Kirsty Young, the thinking Jock’s crumpet, kept both hands on the wheel. The man behind the wheel behind the headlights was one Lord Justice Leveson, chief pongo at the eponymous inquiry into, inter alia, the culture, practices, and ethics of the British press. The fear is that the headlights will turn into ray-guns, and before too long Hislop not to mention other upstanding members of the Great British Press will go up in flames, to be left standing, like smouldering stumps after a bush fire, the charcoaled reminders of a once free press.
There has arisen, it seems to Dr No, a certain class of doctor, typically female and in their thirties or forties, maybe a GP, but not in full time clinical practice, perhaps instead involved in medical education in some guise or other, or perhaps not, who number, amongst their many duties, that of patrolling the internet. They patrol other, often male, members of their profession for what they consider to be misdemeanours, great and small, and when they find such misdemeanours, they feel driven to act, in the name of decency, correctness, and the final eradication of all victimisation, bullying and harassment; and for the greater good of the name of a modern caring profession. Dr No calls them The Furies, after the Roman version of the Greek Ερινύες, the avenging goddesses of wrath, who arose, fittingly enough, from drops of blood spilt at the castration of Uranus.
Stilton, the 
This post is not, as it happens, about the misadventures of a trench soldier in the First World War, but is instead about the perils of language: for, if there is one word that fogs today’s NHS reform debate, it is surely privatisation. Unions, the media – only yesterday, Channel 4 reported on ‘
Those who follow the UK medical blogosphere will already be well aware of the curious case of Dr Una Coales, the Korean Missile currently disguised as a locum GP. A prolific, out-spoken, self-promoting and self-publishing writer, with ambitions to become the RCGP’s next president (small fry, given that she is already, according to her twitter page, ‘Conservative Health Secretary’), she has brought a world of fury upon her shoulders for – allegedly – shopping the identity of a person or persons unknown as the real Dr Rant, late of the blogosphere, to the police – or perhaps the GMC, or even both. Within hours, other bloggers started going out, like bulbs on a set of Christmas tree lights. A better known Heat Seeking Missile has weighed in heavily, and told us in no uncertain terms that it is our own stupid, indolent fault that our lights are going out. Her comments as of now lie, steaming like elephant dung roadblocks, at the bitter end of more than one post on the matter. No doubt a similar steamer will be dumped here before too long.
The BMA are at it again. By leveraging (Dr No has been reading too many financial reports of late) proper indignation at unspeakable parents who use their cars as smoke-houses to kipper their kids, they now propose a ban on all smoking in any car – even when the smoker is the only occupant. Perhaps they even want to ban smoking in cars when there is no one in the car. Bloggers and commenters too numerous to mention have pointed out the libertarian and practical legal objections to a total ban – but what about the science behind their proposal? Their briefing paper carries the mark of the BMA Board of Science on its front cover – so the science had better be good. But is it?
Dr No observes Remembrance. Last Friday, the day before yesterday, at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and this time as it happens of the eleventh year of the century, he fell silent and still for two minutes, and remembered those who have given their lives for the freedom we enjoy today. It is a moment of solemn awe for the sacrifice made, and of great humility in the face of such selflessness.
So – the Iranian Hospitalier, Mr Anti Pasta, the ex-Goldman Sachs banker who likes to make the money go a long way (viz. to off-shore tax havens), has finally bagged Hinchingbrooke. His Circle group have been given the contract to take over running the ailing hospital. Radio 4’s Today programme put a curious too-small-to-matter slant on the story, perhaps as relief to too many too-big-to-fail bank/government/country stories. TweedleWebb, however, and to his credit, did manage to slip Mr Pasta the three-in-a-bed question: what happens to the money when you add commercial investors to the provider-patient marriage? Mr Pasta replied in the high tones of a man in a state of preternatural excitement – either that, or someone had recently grabbed him where they had no right to do so. 
Dr No is fed up with the Health and Social Care Bill, and the interminable waffle that surrounds it. To him, it is clearly the death warrant to the National Health Service. Once enacted, it will allow any willing cowboy – and that includes the unscrupulous doctors amongst us – to ride into town, and hawk their wares. Britain’s greatest post-war achievement, healthcare on need not ability to pay, will be dynamited, and Wild West law will prevail. Many, far too many, will perish.