Blair kicked off the Virgin thing - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ou...-mysterious-report-into-nhs-customer-service/I don't think it's that far fetched. A huge number of NHS contracts are outsourced to private companies already - Virgin alone get something like £2bn. You can find the stories in (respectable, evidence-based newspapers) about how many Tories are linked to private healthcare companies winning billions in contracts. it feels like a short step from that to the NHS being more a function of divvying out contracts to private providers and basically being a broker for patients on a tiered system from free (not great) to different levels of payment for services.
But the NHS relies on private healthcare to function anyway down to how stretched it is. The ops they do go to Nuffield and BUPA are costing a lot