England's Junior doctors held a 24-hour strike from 8am yesterday. It was the first of a planned series of strikes. Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party and the Green Party should be commended for their support of the strike. (The strike only applies to England). [15/1/16 11.10am The Labour Party's position on the strike is complex, " ... Labour’s health spokeswoman Heidi Alexander had explained to them that the party would stand by its policy of not supporting industrial action." John McDonnell joined junior doctors despite Labour agreement to not endorse strike] While it's very tempting to address the strike, today's featured article instead addresses a fundamental problem with the NHS which is largely ignored by corporate media - that of the huge bureaucratic overhead of imposing a fake, imaginary 'market' so that the private sector can extort it's 'tax'. The conclusions to be drawn from this article should be clear. The billions of wasted NHS cash no-one wants to mention Caroline Molloy As calls mount for the NHS cash crisis to be 'solved' by charging patients, there is one pot of money that sits glistening and untouched... Calls to solve the NHS cash crisis by charging patients have mounted this week, with the NHS Confederation calling for £75 a night ‘hotel fees’ for hospital stays, or much longer waiting lists. But there is one pot of money that sits curiously unexamined, glistening and untouched. It’s the cost of the NHS ‘market’ itself. Administering the hugely expensive artificial ‘marketplace’ created by successive governments to allow both NHS and private ‘providers’ to compete with each other to offer services to NHS and other ‘purchasers’. No-one knows the exact cost of this bureaucratic ‘marketplace’. A recent estimate by rebel Lib Dems put the figure as high as £30billion a year. Dr Jacky Davis and other doctors and campaigners including the National Health Action Party have put it at £10billion a year. The Centre of Health & the Public Interest put it at a ‘conservative’ £4.5billion a year. Even the most conservative of these estimates is a yearly amount which would, if re-directed away from useless market activities, fund both the £2billion annual NHS shortfall and free critical social care to everyone, which the Kings Fund’s Barker Commission recently said would cost  ‘substantially less’ than £3billion a year. Despite fierce urging from expert MPs to look at what the ‘market’ costs the NHS more closely, the government, mainstream media, think tanks and policy makers have dismissed, ignored and even suppressed this information, with unevidenced assertions that ‘modern healthcare systems’ need vastly expensive bureaucracy, market or no market. Successive governments wedded to ‘market reform’ have refused to produce useful figures that would definitively establish the cost of the NHS market. It has been left to academics, MPs and activists to try and fill the void, through historical and international comparisons, as well as tentative attempts to cost different activities that are forced on the NHS by the ‘market’. Hiding the figures In 2010 the Health Select…