According to today’s Times, the NHS has decided to link all the country’s medical data and then sell them off to vaguely specified third parties, including pharmaceutical companies, is being delayed for six months. Not because anything is wrong with the plan, mind you, but because of a failure to “build public confidence”. Most striking in this context was the report on confidence-building measures taken so far, consisting of £1 million spent to send a leaflet “to all households in the UK”. Since there are 26 million households in the UK, that would amount to less than 4p per household to print and deliver the leaflet. Thus I am not surprised that a survey found that most people said they had not seen the information. (I certainly didn’t.)
Common Infirmities 