A Spoonful of Sugar

The ideas of the gorgeous, pulsing Minister for Health Industry Privatisation, Randy Burnham, increasingly resemble the remaining denizens of the Glorious Successor's present, and presumably terminal, Cabinet. Ranging effortlessly between the murkily manipulative and the boorishly obnoxious, lurching the gamut between insignificance and inanity, they make up for what they lack in such trivialities as reason and utility thanks to their extraordinary endowments in the far more significant matter of sheer brute obstinacy. Randy, whose single major idea as Secretary for Cultchah was that libraries should not be the sort of places where potential consumers can sit around in silence all day doing nothing but read and think, has come up with another winner along much the same lines; namely, that hospitals should be rewarded for their public-relations skills as well as (we'll get to the instead of stage soon enough, no doubt) for tedious, uninnovationalistic things like alleviating people's illnesses. He plans, if that is the verb I want, to end the "get what you are given" culture in the health service by linking hospital budgets to "patient satisfaction" with regard to "the ease with which a patient can use clean toilets" and "the quality of food", neither of which is apparently a matter for concern at the moment and both of which Randy lumps in with such crying national needs as the manner of receptionists and the "attractiveness" of wards. Randy has been "inspired by practice in America, where private healthcare companies offer rewards to medical centres rated highly by their patients", and where the resulting system is working so well that even the pragmatic wing of the Republican Party (viz. the Democratic Party) seems to think somebody ought to do something about it.