The world economy may tremble, but life goes on. So the House of Lords is getting stuck into the government's ragbag new Health Bill in its own inimitable way.
The bill had its second reading three weeks ago and started its detailed committee on Monday.
As usual the process has been awash with noble health experts, not just elderly patients who have seen a bit, but NHS coalface workers like health minster Lord Darzi, Care Quality Commission chair Baroness Young of Old Scone and countless medics and managers. It is all very charming.
Like most political reporters at Westminster I never pay enough attention to the Lords unless there is trouble afoot, like the recent ruckus about undeclared financial interests. It allows them to do good by stealth - more good than bad.
Several things leapt out of the second reading. One was sharply divided views on the NHS constitution, which is established via the bill without actually being included in it. Some peers were sceptical, like Tory spokesman Lord Naseby, others hostile until they read it.
But sceptics are worried either that its rights and responsibilities are meaningless ("it is not a constitution", insisted ex-GP crossbencher Baroness Finlay) or that they will open the floodgates to yet more litigation.
This will be probed further in committee. For now the polymath Darzi, handling his first bill on top of that day job in surgery, says it creates only three new rights, to informed choice, to recommend vaccinations and to expect that all local decisions on funding and treatment "be rationally made". The rest already exist in law and are merely being codified.
Among such experts you will not be surprised to learn that there was controversy over the bill's key concept of "quality accounts", covering safety, patient experience and outcome in terms of nationally comparable data.
It is an example of what someone called an "NHS nerds'" issue. Typical of this debate, Labour's Baroness Wall, a former union official, now chairs Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals trust in North London. She was 110 per cent for them and explained in formidable detail what her trust already does to obtain, study and learn from what goes on - dignity, surgery, food, the lot.
But sceptics wondered if intolerable new burdens are being imposed on trusts, how much bad news will actually be released into public view by local providers and how easy it will be to understand.
"The NHS is swimming in data", what is missing is effective analysis, protested Lib Dem Baroness Barker. Baroness Young argues that rival NHS quality accounts will be "aligned" (the nerds' word) to make sense of them.
It would be misleading to say more time was spent on nerd stuff than on such ever-popular topics as the bill's new curbs on teen smoking, notably cigarette displays in shops and tighter control of vending machines.
Enemies of the "nanny state" like Baroness Knight said legal products should not be hounded, that smuggled tobacco already costs the Treasury£4bn a year and that 44,000 jobs have been lost in pubs because of the smoking ban. Against them were the "do more now" crowd: why not ban vending machines?
But the highlight of the second reading concerned plans to pilot more personal budgets. Again there was a split between champions of direct payments as a liberating force for many patients and those who fear that poor, mentally ill or inadequate patients will flounder or be exploited.
The undoubted star was the formidable Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, a woman with crippling spinal muscular dystrophy who became a powerful equal opportunity campaigner, and a peer since 2007.
Her description of trying to replace her special ripple bed (no bed sores) on the internet for£200, then seeking NHS help (countless costly visits and a 16-page questionnaire, culminating in the incorrect diagnosis of a£3,000 bed) was toe-curling. When Lady C threatened to take the£3,000 bed and sell it on eBay the primary care trust relented. She told Lord Darzi "I have saved the NHS£2,650."
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