another: that it's never a bad time for a fresh reorganisation. Otherwise, much has changed. The source of the money that funds the NHS is still, as in 1948, general taxation, and there are no plans to change this. For the first 30 years, civil servants in Whitehall and the regions doled out annual budgets to hospitals and GPs according to the size of the populations they served and an estimate of the scale of their health problems. Money flowed down from the Treasury, but it didn't flow horizontally between the different parts of the NHS. Each element got its overall allowance, paid its staff, obtained its equipment and supplies, and co-operated, sometimes well, sometimes not, with the other elements, according to an overarching plan. The aim was fairness, an even spread of care across the country. In a monopoly healthcare system, competition had no place; on the contrary, it seemed sensible to the planners to avoid duplication of services. It was patriarchal and democratic, innovative and hidebound, cumbersome and cheap. For the majority without private insurance, if you were ill, you knew you'd always be cared for; if you were cared for carelessly, you had nowhere else to go. It's objectively hard to describe how money flows through the NHS now. The 'now' of the time of writing is not the 'now' of two weeks hence. In England -- Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have gone along divergent health paths -- the various parts of the NHS had already