[The article foresees some limited charging for services as inevitable] ..... This is part-privatisation, and no doubt where we will end up. Throwing ever greater sums of public money at healthcare is not, and cannot be, the way forward even if the political consensus for it could be found.

Demand is a bottomless pit. If provision is seen to be effectively free at the point of delivery, it can never be sated.

There is no limit to what doctors can, and will, spend attempting to keep people alive. The older society becomes, the more expensive it gets. If a publicly funded NHS is to survive, some way of capping the demands that are put on it, leaving the rest to private provision, has to be found. Ethically, and morally, this is a much bigger challenge than the politically heated debate around largely futile NHS reform. Yet it must eventually be faced.