The full text of PM David Cameron's RSA speech on public services can be found here.

What follows below is the NHS-relevant sections, with some observations about the content in bold.

A major media offensive is under way to launch NHS Week (as the Downing Street 'media grid' has it.) This is the first step in the effort to tell the story of 'liberating the NHS'.

Policyland is a funny little bubble, and it is probably useful for us to remember that most people don't plough through vast policy documents. So for many people, the news of a vast, whole-scale, whole-system NHS reform throughout this week is going to be the first they have heard about it.

The Guardian's Denis Campbell has the story that shadow health secretary John Healey's effort to obtain the DH impact assessment for SOS Lansley's plan for 'Liberating The NHS' under Freedom Of Information legislation has been refused.

Of late, two 20th-century political figures have been much-quoted in regard to NHS reform.

Both men - Stalin and Mao - were highly-effective Communist dictators who also killed a lot of their own people.

Yes, I'm hoping there isn't a subtext too.

The NHS lines, Prime Minister’s Questions 12.1.11

Ed Miliband, Leader Of The Opposition: “His health minister (Paul Burstow MP. Lib Dem) said in his surgery, ‘I don’t want you to trust David Cameron – he has values I don’t share’.”

…

Irwin Brown of the Socialist Health Association wonders at a fragmented future for the NHS

When the previous Tory government came into power in 1979, they had a clear agenda about changes to public services and they had a hidden agenda that allowed them to weaken the likely centres of opposition to their plans.

They used their state power to reduce the power and role of the trade unions and local government, and they used a variety of means, including the break-up of the council estates, to weaken communities. The Labour opposition was poorly placed to oppose.

The law is an intriguing thing; employment law even more so.

Long-time Health Policy Insight readers will remember that we covered John Watkinson’s original Employment Tribunal victory against his dismissal as CE by Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust in terms which NHS South West’s CE Sir Ian Carruthers’ colleagues didn’t much like.

"It is not good management to say 'you need to cut costs by £15 billion; go find the savings. It is good management to say, 'we need to cut costs by £15 billion, and here's how we might do it'. Without this 'here's how', managers are not managing. They are posturing".

Independent challenge has never been wildly popular in NHS health policy, to put it mildly.

Liberating The NHS originally promised much more independent challenge - though as our analysis of the DH response to the White Paper consultation pointed out, quite a few of the proposed freedoms (especially for Monitor) are deferred or dropped, and the Secretary Of State’s role is to be much less diminished than promised.

It's very tempting to refract all of NHSland and health policy through children's television.

There are too many parallels for comfort: strategic health authorities as the large and largely pointless Haa-Hoos from In The Night Garden; GP practice-based commissioners as Bagpuss - "and when Bagpuss wakes up, all his friends wake up too!"; and SoS Lansley as, well, La La from the Teletubbies.