This is really about semantics. In theory, the NHS will still exist for patients in Surrey. They will still pay their National Insurance contributions, and access to services will still be free at the point of use – for the time being at least. This is what the Government means when it says it will protect the NHS. But for residents of Surrey, and soon for the rest of us, the NHS will just be a nominal logo, an institution reduced from being the chief provider of heath services in this country with one of the biggest workforces in the world, to an anachronistic insurance scheme, divorced from the actual delivery of any care. It will become a bureaucratic governing body dishing out public money to private companies. Even the doctors and nurses who work in Surrey’s hospitals and healthcare centres taken over by Virgin Care are no longer employed by the NHS and instead have had to become corporate lackeys. They had no choice: a Virgin Care spokesman confirmed to me that if they didn’t want to work for the company when it took over services from the NHS, their only option was to resign.