Health Policy Insight understands that the NHS White Paper will be launched at the end of July. It will be accompanied by five consultation documents, on various aspects of policy.

UPDATE: As you may well be aware, events have moved on rather fast since this was written. See here for own-word-consumption.

This adjournment debate in the Commons last night is of interest. Firstly, it shows that dwarf-baiting Health Minister Simon Burns MP is going to prove an effective performer on the defensive. That will prove a useful skill.

Health policy is fun.

No, honestly, sit down and watch. You get to see the whole gamut of emotions, religions and vices pass by you.

Guardian social affairs editor Randeep Ramesh (at whom I wrongly had a go on this blog ages back - sorry, Randeep) was at the launch of the latest report from the Commission On 2020 Public Services At The RSA, where Commons health select committee chair and ex-Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell hymned the praises of vouchers in the NHS.

The Magnificent Timmins does it again.

Nick's FT piece confirms what we reported in our coverage of David Nicholson's Confed speech: that Lansley's proposed NHS reforms are held up by the Coalition committee as well as by the Treasury.

How depressing to see fresh evidence that the great Julian Tudor Hart’s Inverse Care Law remains as true as ever.

‘Tackling inequalities in life expectancy in areas with the worst health and deprivation’, the new report on health inequalities from the National Audit Office deserves your attention.

Hooray for openness, with which the Coalition government has given us a high-earners list.

Basically, anyone pulling down more than PM David Cameron's £150,000 in Non-Departmental Public Bodies (quangos, in the old money) has been added to the highest-paid civil servants list published in early June.

No particular comment about this: we'd all like to earn as much as we can. But the people you want to ensure don't have long pockets and slight hands at the bar next time are:

First, it was targets. I definitely remember the Conservatives promising to abolish targets.

Next was added a variety of adjectives: "process" targets, or "clinically unjustified" targets.

But they were definitely going to abolish targets.

Hello.

I'm going to be stupidly busy today, so would offer for your edification this excellent analysis piece form Sally Gainsbury for HSJ.

Financial governance matters greatly; the more so when other departments are having 25% of their budgets cut so that health can have protected, real-terms growth. Whatever 'real-terms' may mean.

Oh no, Hamish. No, no, noooooooo.

This is a bit silly.

I know there is a view that the BMA is at its best when it’s battling a Conservative government, as when opposing the introduction of the internal market.

Even Justice Secretary, chubby tobacconist and then-Health Secretary Kenneth Clarke admitted that the BMA won the PR war for public opinion over the internal market.

We don’t even know yet what GP-led commissioning is going to be called.

It might be called ‘clinical commissioning’. It might be called ‘Eric’.

We do know that it is not going to be called GP practice-based commissioning (PBC), and on the evidence of the new DH Year Three survey on PBC, that is A Good Thing.