Professor Alan Maynard OBE reflects on the true crisis in NHS dentistry - PCTs' lack of teeth

Policymaking in Whitehall Village is like watching a crab traverse the beach: it is slow, and you despair of it ever getting there. As you think it is getting there, it is engulfed by a wave of nonsense which sets it back to from where it started.

So that was Andy Burnham's conference speech. Well, nobody will be hassling him about his leadership ambitions.

In fairness, he was not left much room by Brown's announcements on cancer diagnostics and the new National Care Service (the unravelling funding of which is well-covered here by HSJ's Sally Gainsbury).

Good morning. You may have caught PM Gordon Brown on the BBC's Today programme this morning. When James Naughtie asked him about the funding of the new National Care Service, Brown's reply was "it's starting in September 2010 - it will cost £350 million in the first year; £670 million in the second year".

Further to today's figures of a £200 million cost for the proposed new National Care Service given live on BBC TV coverage by Andy Burnham after Gordon Brown's Labour Party conference speech, the interview with Ed Milliband on tonight's Newsnight saw Milliband tell Jerrums Paxman the cost will be £700 million: £400 million from the health budget and £300 million from local government.

Footage on TV of the Labour Party conference in Brighton has had a haunted and almost surreal air. Where once the hyper-activity and jostling of the influence-purchasers added to the members' mix of the ambitious and the faithful, now the sense of the faded, the prime-past is prerfectly aposite for a seaside town out of season. Ennui. The empty seats in the hall for even the bigger-beast speakers thus far have the mute eloquence of tombstones.

This morning’s policy seminar at the NHS Confederation, ‘From payment for activity to payment for transformation- is PbR fit for the downturn?’ saw a series of impressively thoughtful reflections on PbR, the tariff and incentives.

Sometimes, people smile superciliously at me for taking the Liberal Democrats’ health policy seriously. That’s okay, of course. A lot of people got used to the vacuousness that persisted under Charles Kennedy’s leadership of the party. Others simply can’t imagine the political arithmetic that could give the Lib Dems the balance of power at Westminster.

Two posts today: this, the first, is about the US health reform agenda (the next will be on the Lib Dems’ health policy announcements and the need for drugs. The two are not connected.)

A caucus around Baucus?
The Economist offers an update on the proposed plan from Senator Max Baucus, head of that body’s finance committee.

We are living through a sea-change of health policy. This much you will have noticed. This much has been forced on UK PLC by the recession.

An ebb-tide of the unprecedented NHS economic growth since 2000 had been planned after 2010-11 in the last comprehensive spending review anyway - but the global credit crunch has given those plans short shrift.

Economic swine flu

Good morning. The Independent has the story of why Andy Burnham is turning up to today's 'back-to-school' debate at the Kings Fund.

It is so he can make an announcement that patients will be able to choose to register with any GP anywhere, including close to a place of work.