Oh dear. The British Medical Association is promising health ministers a long hot summer over the Health Bill, instead of a few calm weeks for leisurely reflection; this is in the misplaced hope that the medics can force its withdrawal before the bill goes to the obstreperous Lords.

This is a naive political strategy, much as you’d expect from a trade still being blamed for opposing the NHS in 1946. The Health Bill may be increasingly irrelevant as Sir David Nicholson tightens his centraliser’s grip on the parallel efficiency drive. David Cameron is also politically weakened by the phone hacking affair and the sluggish economic recovery his chancellor promised.

But that means the pair are even less likely to afford to lose such an important bill which the disaffected Tory right has decided to value even if the competition side of it has been severely compromised by the need to placate the Lib Dems and bolshy NHS opinion.

I find myself in the odd position of thinking the right is right in its instinct, even though I am halfway through The Big Short, Michael Lewis’s astonishing 2010 account of the Wall Street crash of 2007-09. It  makes the excesses of the banking community even more ignorant, greedy and wicked than I had previously understood. Ditto their colleagues in the City of London.

The lesson I draw is not that we should withdraw from financial innovation. Sound credit is what makes the world go round now that few folk live in caves. But it should be better regulated by state-backed but independent, properly funded agencies to save it from itself.

Likewise healthcare. At a conference recently I listened to private sector health entrepreneurs, displaying varying degrees of nous, regret the botch job Andrew Lansley has done to promote the Blair-inherited competitiveness agenda while insisting that innovation is the unavoidable necessity for the NHS, the only way it – like most healthcare systems – can avoid bankruptcy as we all get older or fatter.

And who innovates best? In every industry, it is newcomers, explained one fast talking participant. From the liberalisation of the farm sector in the 1940s and 1950s (to become the highly productive business that now feeds the world) to telecoms, banking and media in the 1980s. (Yes, I know, it has usually been new entrants driving progress. In post-war Britain the big failure was manufacturing, hamstrung by well meaning state interventions until it was on its knees.)

A simplification, I know. The NHS has a creditable history of medical innovation, it does all sorts of things very well, as another academic survey suggested only this month. High octane banking went bust and I don’t see Steve Jobs’s iPad as demonstrating that established firms like Apple can’t keep innovating.

But would-be health innovators here have been getting twitchier about the uncertain direction of reform in the NHS, eyeing better opportunities in France or beyond. At one recent Middle East health junket 50 private sector health providers were flogging their wares from Singapore alone. They do not have a worse healthcare system in small but smart Singapore.

So when Mr Lansley opens fresh bits of the service in England to competition (on quality, not price, of course), as he did the other day, should the British Medical Association be blasting away at it?

More intelligently, should it be wondering whether (say) payment per episode of healthcare is the best means of promoting integration? Or whether Monitor has the teeth it will need to promote the right sort of competition and stamp on destructive private sector cherry-picking? Or even public sector prejudice among commissioners?

We know it happens.