What puzzles me about all of this is that people keep talking about it being part of privatising the NHS.
No it isn't. It's about the Tories using the NHS as a means of them are their buddies making money out of the NHS. If they actually privatised the NHS then the opportunities to make money would be much lower than if they force the NHS to use private contractors thus passing taxpayer's money out to profit making organizations. The fact that this makes the NHS even more financially inefficient than it already is will of course be used by the government to force even more reforms onto the NHS - those reforms being contracting out even more services to private companies at even more profits for those companies and even greater cost to the taxpayer.
The benefits for the Tories of course are that them and their buddies can continue to make money out of the NHS.And of course this isn't just he NHS but as much of the public sector as possible.
You will recall that one of the benefits of Brexit touted by the government was that EU procurement rules would no longer be enforced and therefore public sector bodies would no longer be forced to consider bids from EU based companies and they could chose to BUY BRITISH. You will probably also have noticed (especially if you are a regular reader of El Reg) how many public sector contracts have gone out to foreign companies since Brexit. A lot of these companies are European. You may be puzzled by this, but the reason is simple. If a government minister happened to be a beneficiary of a British company with public sector contracts even after they resign as an MP then it would be relatively easy for the likes of the press to find out (not that much of the press isn't owned by Tory sympathisers). With a foreign company the money would be much harder to follow.
There is however another benefit to the Tories. In order to fund this greater and greater financial inefficiency they have to keep on increasing funding to the NHS. Thus they can trumpet the fact that they are increasing NHS spending and then blame the NHS when that money is wasted, rather than admitting that they are forcing the NHS to waste its money.
Of course this will eventually need sorting out or it will kill the goose that lays the golden egg, but do you think Rish! and his mates will care by then. Of course not. They'll be somewhere out of the country sipping cocktails on expensive yachts with full bank accounts. I mean it's not like any of them ever use the NHS is it? Unless of course they need emergency treatment that their fancy private hospitals don't provide...