Not everybody likes Professor Allyson Pollock's analysis of the involvement of the commercial sector in the NHS. Professor Pollock is, to put it mildly, clearly no fan of a mixed economy or competition, and she would appear to fundamentally distrust and oppose the involvement of the commercial sector in the NHS under all circumstances.

HPI associate director Tom Smith discusses the reclusive green paper on social care.

This week, the Telegraph reported that internal rows in the Department of Health are delaying the publication of the green paper on social care. The story is that Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper cannot agree on the options it should contain and whether their release makes political sense so close to the Norwich North by-election.

Good morning. The Independent draws our attention to the report from the EU on pharmaceutical industry competitiveness - or anti-competitiveness.

Those of you with longer memories will recall that I wrote about US economist Dr Christopher Ruhm's work on the health impacts of recessions a while ago.

Professor Ruhm's findings have been validated by EU-wide analysis research published in The Lancet.

Good morning to you. Today's post relates to heath policy tangentially, through the medium of economics; specifically, the government's announcement later today of its plans for the banking sector.

We have had to become a good deal more literate about the financial sector: the recession has semi-professionalised intelligent amateurs who care about public policy.

Mostly, it has been a very alarming experience to realise that the wealth creation of the past decade has been to a huge extent about leverage and securitisation.

Gambling, basically.

Hello. Today we have a new interview with Simon Stevens, conducted at the recent NHS Confederation conference in Liverpool.

The noisier debate about NHS reform over recent years focused more on the practical effects of Stevens' thinking about the introduction of choice and contestability into the NHS.

Interview by Andy Cowper

Simon Stevens is well-known to the NHS policy world as one of the principal architects of the New Labour health reforms as policy adviser to health secretaries Frank Dobson and Alan Milburn and PM Tony Blair.

You may not yet understand the Mail newspaper’s secret mission.

You may have thought of it merely as a reactionary, anxiety-peddling, little-Englander middle-market tabloid full of comedy health scare stories; gaily juxtaposing finger-wagging features about eating disorders with a PR puff for the latest diet book and a bitchy column about celebrity cellulite; balancing the intermittent interesting bit of news with ‘did aliens build Stonehenge?’ features.

Hello. You will probably have already seen the row over Sally Gainsbury of Health Service Journal’s reporting of what Andrew Lansley said to her about workforce pay negotiations. She asked if he was happy with negotiations between the unions and NHS Employers beginning before the announcement of the next CSR.

Here is an interesting idea from Health Minister Lord Darzi, given to The Guardian today in an exclusive interview, about giving acute clinical teams control over their own budgets.

It's genuinely interesting. It could just be a means to real clinical engagement - or it could be a Machiavellian scheme to both stop their mouths with gold and to make them as complicit as a 'blame hound'.