Channel 4 news reports another story of structural failure in the NHS today. Doctors told a woman in South Wales that she needed a scan to discover whether a lump on her lungs was cancerous. The application for a scan was rejected on the grounds that it would be too expensive.
This might sound like just another story of brutal rationing within a service that wastes so much of its budget. It's worse. The scan would not only be less invasive and dangerous than the thoracotomy that the Heath Commission Wales recommended it is also less expensive.
That's right. The Commission made the decision because that would mean the cost coming out of another NHS body's budget. Insanity.