Information Director, London Health Emergency Tony Blair is passing on to Brown the damaging task of forcing through a highly controversial round of closures and rationalisation of hospital services, driven above all by the need to slim down public sector provision to make room for a significant and viable new private sector that nobody wanted in 1997, and nobody but Blair and his cronies are asking for now.
Blair's claim that we had just "24 hours to save the NHS" was one of the finishing touches to New Labour's crushing victory over the discredited Tory government.
Blair also famously promised back then to sweep away the "wasteful and bureaucratic market system" that Thatcher's reforms had set in motion and John Major's ministers had implemented. He never did so.
Now Blair has swung full circle. Far from "saving the NHS" he supports swinging in high-cost figureheads from an Blair's contradictory legacy alien, exclusive and hugely inefficient health system (see above) - one that vividly demonstrates the costs and failures of market-style policies in health care.
To his credit, Blair was the first prime minister to concede openly in 1999-2000 that spending on the NHS had to be substantially increased, with year-on-year increases above inflation to reverse decades of under-funding by successive governments, estimated by the Wanless report to stack up to a cumulative £270 billion. That was a welcome change.
It was this bold decision to more than double NHS spending, to recruit more staff, open more beds and facilities that has been the key to the second major change for which Blair can legitimately claim credit - the massive reduction in waiting lists and waiting times that has been achieved since 2000.
The problem is that both Blair and his coterie of fanatically promarket advisors claim that the transformation has been brought about by their rapid-fire series of "reforms", and by the dramatic expansion of private sector facilities delivering NHS-funded care
In fact the private sector treatment centres and contracts with private hospitals have proved marginal to the growing numbers of people accessing health care.
Only a third of the 10 million people admitted as in-patients to hospital in England are surgical patients - and less than 2 percent of these were treated by the private sector.
By contrast more than 6 million people require medical treatment - which is largely unavailable from the private sector, which centres on profitable, low-risk surgical procedures.
And 4.6 million hospital inpatients were admitted as emergencies, accessing care that only the NHS provides.
Maybe he did "save the NHS" - but as the delighted shareholders of treatment centres, private hospitals and PFI consortia toast the Blair legacy, while health workers prepare for action to prevent a substantial pay cut, the question must be - saved it for whom?