Dalrymple reports in a piece at the Library of Law and Liberty that the NHS has begun to pay doctors “55 pounds sterling ($90) for each diagnosis of dementia that they make in their patients.” Besides the obviously troubling premises and implications of this policy — that doctors are either unwilling or unable to make such diagnoses without financial inducement and that false diagnoses might be encouraged — Dalrymple points out a larger issue:

The suspicion grows that this is the beginning of an attempt to corrupt the medical profession that will do its bidding for this, and other future tasks that may be even more sinister. And all the while the government extends its control, claiming that it is concerned—oh so concerned—about the people (or is it the flock of sheep?) for whose welfare it deems itself responsible. Nothing is more delightful than to be compassionate and generous at other people’s expense, and with other people’s money, and so benevolence in rulers is therefore as much to be watched as vice.