http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/10557996.stm
Today, the new Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley spelt out the new Coalition's plans for the NHS.
Key amongst these are allowing GPs to determine the best treatment for a patient and eventually scrapping Primary Care Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities.
However, GPs are not managers; not all of them will want the extra administrative responsibilities that will come with these changes.
By the end of the recent Labour government, nobody had to wait more than 18 weeks to see a consultant, or more than two weeks for a consultation with a cancer specialist.
At a stroke, the Coalition has abolished these measures. Measures that were making our NHS better than it had ever been.
Now, without these guarantees and with no mention in the statement today of who exactly GPs will be accountable to if things go wrong, patient care is bound to suffer.
Are we now being transported back to the bad old-days of patients lying for hours on trolleys in A&E? Or patients having to wait months in pain for operations not considered to be urgent?
GPs will be allowed to buy services from private companies whose main concern will be profit rather than the well-being of the patient.
It is a return to the Thatcherite policies of the 1980s which caused untold misery to those unable to afford private healthcare.
The electorate will not welcome these changes and they will only serve to make the coalition more unpopular than it is now.
The NHS isn't broke, so let's not fix it.
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