The UK was already supposed to be well on the way to making the grid smarter but the project has been delayed because of worries about the central control system.

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The central government has put in place a joint prevention and control system and hospitals have been told to report any suspected cases of swine flu swiftly.

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It's a fractional reserve system with no reserve requirements and no central bank control.

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Its aim was to control costs by injecting more competition into the system, and to overhaul financing by introducing a central health fund.

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In the SDN approach, those control functions are split off to be managed by one central program, which may be run on an inexpensive server system.

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