The conspiracy theorists should have had a field day with last Sunday's report from the ministerial review group which was established by Tony Ryall shortly after he became Minister of Health.
That is because draft copies of the report leave little doubt that something or someone persuaded the review group, which was chaired by former Treasury boss Murray Horn, to water down or remove some of its more controversial suggestions before the final version was presented to the minister.
Even in its final form, the report came with a degree of political risk.
The review group's reform recipe would gut the Ministry of Health and set up a National Health Board which would be responsible for allocating funding of health services with the intention of improving access to services and hospital productivity.
The recommendations bear a marked resemblance to National's hugely unpopular health reforms of the early 1990s which were designed to get more efficiency into the delivery of health services by forcing hospitals to compete with one another.
However, the report's complexity and Mr Ryall's deliberately polite, but essentially lukewarm reception to its contents has ensured it has not caused the ruckus it might have done.
Mr Ryall stressed the Cabinet had yet to examine the recommendations, while he repeated his mantra that the Government will not agree to anything which increases bureaucracy or does not improve front-line services.
Ryall's usual consummate handling of things hit a few bumps in Parliament, however, when he was obliged to clarify whether he had received drafts of the report.
He confirmed he had received drafts of part of the report which he tabled.
He had maintained regular contact with Mr Horn, while he also had dinner with the review group as a whole on one occasion.
However, he denied he had issued instructions for the report's recommendations to be changed.
The denial was in response to Labour's claims of political interference which were based on different documents.
They appear to have been leaked to that party and reveal what seems to be early thinking on the part of the review group.
This include references to the need for wage freezes in the public health sector and suggest allowing hospitals to conduct surgery on foreign patients to boost funding.
The latter idea seems to have been quickly dropped.
It was simply not a goer politically.
However, Labour instead seized on a piece of economic analysis about the aged and health care and turned it into an exaggerated claim that National intended to alter superannuation eligibility to encourage people to work longer.
Ryall scoffed at this - as well he might.
There was no mention - as he noted - of any such idea in the final report.
The drafts released by Mr Ryall are a very different story.
They contain the real political dynamite.
They show the review group was seriously toying with much stronger market-based incentives to lift hospital productivity while adopting an Act New Zealand-like model which would have had the patient and his or her doctor themselves choosing whether to have surgery in a private or public hospital.
The taxpayer would fund the procedure, not the institution.
This radical proposal - "one we recommend" - was a consistent feature of the drafts right up until three weeks before the final report was sent to Mr Ryall.
Strange then that this "recommendation" did not make the final version, although there is an oblique reference to it.
Had it done so, however, it would have re-stoked the simmering debate on whether the National Government has a privatisation agenda for the delivery of social services.
The potential backlash might have even derailed or at least forced a delay in National's timetable for shaking up a health sector, which, with current budgetary constraints and an ageing population, is going to have to do far more with a lot less.
In the final version of the report, the discussion on elective surgery is quarantined from the main thrust of the document and reads almost as an afterthought.
This is extremely surprising because increasing the number of such operations is a top priority if not the top priority for the current Government.
Indeed, Mr Ryall was crowing in Parliament on Thursday over preliminary figures showing the number of patients getting elective surgery in the 2008-09 was 130,216 - an increase of 12,266.
He said this was a record and that the single- year increase was higher than Labour had achieved in total during the previous eight years when it had controlled the health portfolio and doubled the health budget.
Never mind that Ministry of Health reports show the upsurge in electives was happening in the latter months of 2008 when Labour was still in power.
Mr Ryall was taking a liberty in taking all the credit for the figures - but Labour flat-footedly allowed him to get away with it.
Mr Ryall had a means of diverting attention from the report and the drafts Labour was still scrutinising as Parliament wound up for the week late on Thursday afternoon.
Why Mr Ryall tabled the drafts the day before is perplexing.
Perhaps because the Official Information Act-related requests for the material would force him to do so anyway, he thought it better to dump the lot now.
Had he demanded the review group's report be watered down, he would have hardly released the documents which demonstrably showed he did.
Perhaps the ministerial review group muzzled itself.
One comment attached to a draft suggests an awareness of the political niceties.
A recommendation that the Minister of Health make the final decision on whether new medical procedures be eligible for public funding was knocked back for likely exposing the minister to much lobbying and putting him "in the centre of controversial issues".
And there is another factor.
There is little point in being on an inquiry which beavers away for months only to come up with recommendations the minister bins.
Speaking as Acting Prime Minister, Bill English told Parliament on Tuesday that he was sure Mr Ryall had "responsibly discussed with the review group what recommendations it was making".
Mr Ryall confirmed that he had. The review group would have had a clear idea of its parameters. Mr Ryall would not have issued instructions for changes. The way things work, he would not have needed to.
- John Armstrong is The New Zealand Herald's political correspondent.
