The British medical lobby has had an epiphany. Why should they have to worry about adapting to the shifting nature of Britain’s healthcare needs – which reeks of the unwelcome prospect of change – when they can instead simply demand that the government outlaw things that are making us ill?

As individuals depart from the NHS, the part of tax which forms healthcare will decline. Accordingly, the rebate will decline. Eventually, with a competitive market of health care providers where the NHS is but a player, the anomaly of its funding being intermediated by the state could be removed and those contracted to the NHS could then, as they would with other providers, simply pay directly.

The sad reality is that the regulatory state almost always ends up in the hands of the people it was set up to regulate. There is a species of businessmen who long ago discovered that they can increase profits more through manipulating the political process, and skewing markets, than they can do in markets that are not open to political manipulation. Right at the birth of the Progressive Era, when these regulations were created, this sort of manipulation was taking place. Big Business was a major funder of efforts to regulate Big Business, because they knew they would effectively write the regulations.