Other than to apologise, in advance, for any distress and tedium that might result, there is little a column can offer by way of a bespoke service. But improved customer satisfaction must be the mission and many columns will have taken to heart the coalition's introductory programme, with its commitment to ever-improving consumer choice, even in services where this process was thought to be either impossible or irredeemably discredited.

In the NHS, for example, which has already benefited from three decades of choice improvement, the coalition agreement immediately stressed that it would improve on the existing "choose and book" system so as to "give every patient the power to choose any healthcare provider that meets NHS standards". Its white paper on health, Liberating the NHS, promises a new choice enforcer, HealthWatch, the adoption of the principle "no decisions about me without me", a chance for enthusiasts to pick their fantasy consultant's team and, no less exciting, a patient's right to register with any GP they want, a boon to city dwellers who have hankered after a more picturesque surgery, in the Lake District perhaps. And now, exceeding even its own previous offer, the government has asserted the further right of all NHS patients to be supplied, if they choose, with health treatment that does not work.

Although BMA doctors have recently repeated their opinion – no doubt genuinely held – that "homeopathy is witchcraft", and the House of Commons science and technology committee has just called for NHS funding to be withdrawn, the government has pledged to continue providing drugs of long-established futility. "We believe in patients being able to make informed choices about their treatments," it says. With that in mind, doctors will be expected to tell patients that their preferred treatment is a waste of time (supposing they are not, themselves, homeopaths), thus avoiding possible confusion about the nature of the health service. "There naturally will be an assumption," the government allowed, in a document I recommend to anyone in search of an entertaining holiday read, "that if the NHS is offering homeopathic treatments, then they will be efficacious, whereas the overriding reason for NHS provision is that homeopathy is available to provide patient choice."

No doubt, in the years to come, patients will become more familiar with the concept of state-endorsed quackery. Indeed, civil servants facing redundancy in the coming cuts might like to reflect that a qualification in professional homeopathy can be completed within as little as two years – and one in niche alternative treatments, such as Japanese Holistic Face Massage or Hot Stone Therapy, in far less. These, following the government's logic on patient satisfaction, surely deserve their place in the enlightened GP's me-time repertoire.

Although it would be missing the point, as well as curmudgeonly, to insist on evidence that greater choice invariably leads to increased patient satisfaction, the government's blind faith in this respect is striking. And not only where the right to perform your own heart bypass (instruments and trolley provided) is concerned. The education secretary Michael Gove has yet to insist that parents be offered a choice of completely useless, homeopathic-style schools, dedicated to pig ignorance. But it seems rather unfair since they might provide an enlightened alternative to many faith academies, that these should not feature in the coalition's scheme for educational fragmentation, to the point that there is no comprehensible state system. Asked, recently, about a proposal for atheist schools, as an alternative to all the faith ones, Gove told MPs: "It wouldn't be my choice of school, but the whole point of our education reforms is that they are, in the broad sense of the word, small 'l' liberal, that they exist to provide that greater degree of choice."

The small "l" part of that would probably surprise Mrs Thatcher, always eloquent on choice, and, for that matter, Tony Blair, whose effusions on this subject culminated in his 2005 conference speech: "Choice is what wealthy people have exercised for centuries. The Tories have always been comfortable with that. But for Labour, choice is too important to be the monopoly of the wealthy."

Unconcerned that the term is now, in the light of popular experience, somewhat tainted, Gove goes further. Choice is "the whole point" of his reforms. For any particular reason? When parental confusion is already such that the government has to pay for professional choice advisers to help people who are not up to the very modern challenge of finding an acceptable secondary, preferably in the same time zone? Unlike those competent, cunning parents, whose low stratagems demand perpetual vigilance from local authorities, such as Poole borough council, which has been rebuked for spying on a couple it falsely suspected of being guilty of the new crime of catchment fraud.

It is not merely the chorus from anguished parents (and patients), that they cannot exercise choice where there is no spare capacity, that might give a rational education secretary pause, but a growing body of research indicating that too much choice is overwhelming. Gove will know of the much cited experiment with jam, by the US academic Sheena Iyengar, which found consumers were more than six times more likely to buy a pot if they had to choose from six varieties, rather than 24. If uncertainty about preserves is a problem one can probably live with, or possibly enjoy, a similar helplessness in the face of big, irreversible decisions is, to judge by a new study, State of Confusion by Professor Harriet Bradley of Bristol University, something that should worry a government that advertises choice as an unmitigated good.

After surveying 3,000 people on their attitudes to choice, Bradley says: "I believe most people want the state to make these big decisions for them." This is not only because, in many cases, consumers are well aware that the choice of, say, school or hospital is – unlike a commercial selection of jams or phones or holidays – an utter fiction. The process of choosing is itself oppressive when the issues are life-changing, relating to health, money or careers. In her London focus groups, she found parents "absolutely terrified of the whole process of selecting schools", because of the impenetrable, changing rules about eligibility. Even allowing for those professional oxymorons, choice advisers, this situation favours society's most able, while it penalises confused, passive, busy or ill-informed individuals, though they all want the same thing: a good local school.

The implications are also clear for the coming choicefest that is the "big society". "The last thing people want is having more choices thrust on them," Bradley says. "They don't want to be perpetually having to make decisions." Regrettably, pending a general roll-out of the "no decision about me without me" principle, that choice does not appear to be recognised in the array of acceptable responses.