In another eye-catching attempt at reform, the Government this week announced that it was devolving the health‑care budget of Greater Manchester to local control and merging it with social care. In itself, this is a perfectly sensible managerial rearrangement of deckchairs, but it is no more than that, and won’t even begin to address the root causes of Britain’s growing health‑care crisis. These causes can be defined in terms of simple economics. If you provide something that is notionally “free at the point of delivery”, you will create an insatiable demand for it, which will just grow and grow until it breaks the bank.