Health Service Journal news maestro Sally Gainsbury tweets that the new DH permanent secretary, replacing Hugh Taylor, is Una O'Brien, currently health of DH policy and strategy.

James Gubb of Civitas suggests that the NHS obstructs new entrants to the healthcare market on grounds of ideology, and that mostly, market mechanisms have yet to be seriously tried. The NHS should be a 'service quality guarantee' thing; not a 'state-owned provision' thing.

Discussion of market-based reform in the NHS rarely gets an objective play in the public sphere. Free-market ideologues form one side (the market, by virtue of being a market must be the best option); and NHS ‘die hearts’ the other (a bad word against the NHS system of providing healthcare must be a sin).

According to this poll by Conservative Home website, reported in The Independent, 1,727 Conservative Party members' net satisfaction with the performance of Health Secretary Andrew 'The Liberator' Lansley is at 54%, putting him at Number 10 among Cabinet Ministers.

The good news is that this is an improvement from his ranking in May, when the same kind of polling put him sixteenth.

Burnham is showing smart offensive tactics and quite a pair of Eds here, challenging Lansley to call a halt in the light of GP opposition to his plans.

Will the Great Liberator blink?

Text of Andy Burnham's letter to Health Secretary Andew Lansley today:

House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA

1st October 2010

Dear Andrew

NHS White Paper Reforms

I would like to put to you a way forward on NHS reforms, in light of the fierce criticism that is emerging from professional bodies.

We had been warned, but that starkness of the BMA's response to Health Secretary Andrew Lansley's White Paper remains surprising.

The NHS's economic future isn't what it used to be.

Nor is its organisational future.

Nor indeed is its political future.

Today I had the huge privilege of attending the Bob Sang Open Space, an event held to celebrate and continue the work of the late Professor Bob Sang, whose final article written for this website you may have read.

Stephen Dorrell's comments to BBC News today again show a man whose chairmanship of the Health Select Committee promises to be both use and ornament.

He rightly suggests that "people are being charged for care that they would have got free from the NHS 20 or 30 years ago. In effect there has been a change in the definition of what constitutes NHS care and that has happened without proper debate.

Andy Burnham’s speech this morning to the Labour Party conference was a belligerent little number. It could really have done without the extravagantly unfunny joke about Nick Clegg’s tie colour, riffing on ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree’.

Ed Miliband's first conference speech as Labour leader was pretty good. He didn't seem born to platform oratory (and at points looked a bit nauseous). His perfomance style was caught between 'to camera' and 'for the hall', which led to awkward moments; and he stumbled over the odd word (but we're not in John Prescott territory).

The recent report from NICE's Citizen's Council has got some media traction for its support of offering material incentives for healthy or healthier behaviour.