Despite the evidence that the NHS is now an electoral liability for Labour, Brown has made it quite clear that he wants to carry through and even extend Blair's "modernising" reforms.
These have already brought a massive expansion of private provision of clinical and other NHS services, and the threat of far-reaching closures of departments and whole hospitals - to make room for a new private sector.
Worse, both Blair and now Brown have endorsed the appointment of a top executive from the US health insurance giant United Health as "director general" of a new NHS directorate for 'commissioning and systems management' that will shape policy both on the purchasing of services from the private sector and on commissioning within the
R. Channing Wheeler, (apparently known as "Chan" Wheeler), was chief executive of Uniprise, division of UnitedHealth, which is the biggest seller of health insurance in the US. In the first nine months of last year, UnitedHealth had about $54 billion in revenue, on which it posted a profit of $3 billion.
UnitedHealth's boss William McGuire, a sponsor of George Bush, picked up a package of almost $125m in 2005, before being forced to resign with multi-million payoff amid allegations of having defrauded company shareholders through use of back-dated stock options.
By contrast Wheeler has been relatively low paid, scraping by on just $1.4m (£700,000) a year for the last three years, plus another $8m made from the. sale of stock options: official investigations are still proceeding into some of Wheeler's back-dated stock options between 1998 and 2002.
But even if no impropriety
found, given that UnitedHealth, like other US health insurers, raises its profits largely through excluding the poor and sick from coverage and focusing on the wealthy and well, it is hard to see what useful contribution Mr Wheeler can bring to a National Health Service which is charged with delivering universal and comprehensive care.
His appointment sends out an unmistakeable signal that under Brown, possibly even more so than under Blair, even the sharpesttoothed sector of private enterprise is preferable to public sector provision -and that the costly marketstyle reforms that have pushed up administrative costs while siphoning funds out of NHS Trust budgets are set to continue.
Brown has also been a key figure in the implementation and expansion of the as 125 years to PFI consortia, giving private firms control over the land new hospitals have been built
But another income stream for private shareholders is also gathering pace and volume as ministers press ahead with second wave of "Independent Sector Treatment Centres" despite warnings from the Commons Health Committee that there is no evidence that the new units are really needed, or that they deliver value for money.
BUPA has just picked up the latest contract to be signed, for providing 6,000 non-complex waiting list operations year in Merseyside and Cheshire: more centres are on the way in the North West, North
East of England, London and the South East, with an estimated total cost of £350m a year - all of which will be sliced out of existing budgets of NHS Trusts, forcing on the round of closures and rationalisation begun under Patricia Hewitt. UBLIC