No, not that we’d all become slaves the moment that the NHS tottered into action. Not that he said that anyway - rather, that once health care was politically delivered then health itself was going to become a political matter.

George Monbiot complaining about this in his column:

A recent study shows that diseases mostly afflicting women tend to receive less funding than those mostly affecting men. Scientific effort is also, to a large extent, a function of the effectiveness of patients’ campaigns.

When medical care is run by the political system then of course politics will determine what is treated and how. When medical research is allocated by politics then political power will determine what gets researched.

The problems with Monbiot’s complaint is that this is the world that those on the left desire. That all of these things be allocated by the political system. Therefore, of course, it is going to be political power - threats to vote or not vote, campaigns to whip up the populace, the clamour of public politics that is - which will determine investigation.

Why, that is, is the complaint about the world they themselves have created? Or even, how dare they complain about political allocation when they campaign for political allocation?