So Streamlined You Can't See the Point

Two strong supporters of Twizzler Lansley's anti-NHS bill have restructured their support in much the same way as the Twizzler has been restructuring the NHS; namely, by unceremoniously removing it. The Twizzler, as part of a government which promised no more disruptive, cumbersome top-down reorganisations of the NHS, also promised to put power into the hands of general practitioners, who have been simply itching to work as part-time accountants and bureaucrats ever since the sixty-year error was implemented. Freed of government interference, the Twizzler proclaimed, GPs could judge what was best for their own patients while managing their own budgets and balancing private and public services for the benefit of just about everyone who mattered. However, the Twizzler has now decided that the GPs' commissioning will be controlled by a National Commissioning Board, a new layer of bureaucracy which has been imposed as part of the Twizzler's attempt to get rid of bureaucracy. According to the back of the Department for Health Privatisation's latest envelope, the new, streamlined, localised NHS will be run through the same fifty local offices which ran the old primary care trusts and strategic health authorities, plus four sector outposts, all using a single operating model. A spokesbeing clarified that the Board would "provide national standards", but that doctors and nurses would be free to make decisions about their patients and organisations within the parameters of whatever degree of micro-management was deemed appropriate by the Twizzler's chums in the private healthcare, pharmaceutical and processed-food industries.