You could not make this shit up - truly.

The Magical Money Tree Where Cash Grows For Free has evidently been grafted onto the Japanese Knotweed Bullshit Plant to produce this exciting new hybrid.

Biology trumps economics every time.

(Sigh) OK. Here we go.

These entirely fictional saving of £4.35 billion will not be achieved by the NHS and the DH. They will not be made through the following brilliant and failsafe schemes:

Morning (as in afternoon). You'll have seen the latest Maynard Doctrine on boomerang health policy. If not, do so now and then come back here.

Oo-kay. So nothing from darling Chancellor Darling about the efficiency savings (indeed, they’ll be funding free social care, so long as you don’t actually need any).

And Cameron’s response was basically ‘vote Conservative’. Hey-ho.

Hello. This week may be more than a bit sketchy. You know what I mean, 'Arry?

Yes, you do.

Anyway. Steve Bundred, apparently.

Monitor’s new chair.

Who wrote this about financial cutbacks in The Times last February.

And this in The Observer last June.

They’ve done it. It’s watered-down, and not perfect. It does very little to really address the causes of cost-inflation, let alone the crucial issue of tort reform. It is going to cost them something in the November mid-term elections.

But the US has – just - got its health bill past Senate.

Hello. Just a very quick one today, as time is very tight. The FT reports that shadow chancellor George Osborne accepts that there will be greater variation in public services under a Conservative government.

That’s nice. Tomorrow he may admit to the existence of gravity. On Sunday, we may hear that the Earth is round.

Good morning. I may be a little off-form today, owing to the sad news of the death of Alex Chilton.

Chilton was a great, if commercially unappreciated, US singer and songwriter. If you’ve never heard his music, particularly Big Star, do so now: you’re going to get something great in your life if you do. (Just avoid anything he recorded since about 1990).

How do? CQC's latest staff survey is out. There will be some nuggets in here - I may even get to finding a few.

Hello. I didn't get round to washing up the remaining articles from last week's Telegraph series on the NHS, and shall now do so quickly.

The quality of these overall varied widely, but many took a reasonable stab at getting some of the issues into the arena of public attention. The Telegraph deserve some credit for that.

Morning. The new report out from the Kings Fund and the Office of Health Economics is worth reading. Getting the most out of PROMs: putting health outcomes at the heart of NHS decision-making by Nancy Devlin and the iridescent John Appleby.

BUPA director Andrew Vallance-Owen’s introduction wryly notes that the traditional NHS outcome measure – of death – is of no help in assessing whether the healthcare the NHS provides adds value.

Wow.

I knew it was a lot of money, but even so ....

In hard figures (found here), this means: