> NHS England is responsible for overseeing the commissioning, the planning and the buying, of NHS services. In practice it also sets quite a lot of NHS strategy and behaves like an NHS headquarters. NHS England commissions some services itself, but passes most of its money onto 200 or so clinical commissioning groups across England, also known as CCGs, which identify local health needs and then plan and buy care for people in their area – people like you and me.

> CCGs buy services from organisations of different shapes and sizes – from NHS trusts that run hospitals and community services, to GPs and others that provide NHS care, including organisations run by charities and the private sector.

Right, so “the government” funds a few public agencies which themselves pass on money to the CCG’s, which also seem to be quasi-autonomous public agencies. The actual care providers are sometimes in the private sector. I’m not sure what distinguishes NHS England or the CCG’s from “the government” other than semantics, but sure.

This is still more administrative overhead than other “universal” systems and does not seem to address the tradeoffs between cost and availability of care. Per Wikipedia:

> A survey of CCGs by the Health Service Journal in April 2015 found that more than a third were planning to save money by restricting access to services, particularly on "procedures of limited effectiveness", podiatry, IVF, and limiting access to procedures based on aspects of a patient's health, for example whether they smoke or are obese, which can affect outcomes.[30] A similar survey by the GP magazine Pulse, in July 2015, found that many CCGs were planning to restrict access to routine care in various ways.[31]