The cutbacks and closures are not in any way accidental: they are avoidable consequences of a policy that centres on the privatisation of a large and growing share of the clinical care and services provided by the NHS.
To make room for an expanding private sector, existing NHS services need to be scaled down or broken up.
This is underlined in a report commissioned by ministers from the so-called 'National Leadership Network', comprising a number of prominent NHS bosses, academics and top figures in NHS-related quangos.
It claims that unchanged hospital services "risk becoming unpopular, unstattable, unsate, unsustainable, resulting on service failure".
In fact we know that local NHS hospitals are among the most popular of all public institutions in this country: as we have seen, any threat to cut or close local NHS hospital services is enough to provoke thousands of
You HAD 6 WEEKS
TO LIVE BUT WE'VE
GOT IT DOWN TO 3! angry people of all ages and political persuasions into protests and campaigning.
By contrast supporters of the government's market-style reforms (which have been swallowed whole and without question by the "Leadership Network) are pathetically tew and far between.
The new spending squeeze, forcing job losses, and the new expanding private sector in health care that is eagerly poaching key sections of NHS staff, are the key factors collapsing morale and making NHS hospitals "unstaffable", while the imposition of a competitive market system involving "payment by results" threatens to render many existing NHS departments and whole hospitals unsustainable.
The Leadership Network proposals suggest remodelling hospital services not to meet patients' needs or wishes, but to meet the new economic pressures of a market system that is being artificially created -at enormous expense.
It suggests that A&E units could be managed without onsite 24-hour access to servicec normally seen as vital - including emergency and specialised surgery, trauma & orthopaedics, paediatrics, obstetrics & gynaecology and mental health.
And it proposes to replace the "one size fits all" model of district general hospitals with vague 'networks' of hospitals and community services.
The end result of these proposals would be the closure, downgrading and downsizing of many existing general hospitals, leaving many people requiring emergency treatment facing much longer journeys or delays in accessing care.
Patricia Hewitt has said that her reforms would mean "reorganising services, reconfiguring hospitals, doing more treatment and diagnostics in the community, in primary care centres and community hospitals" because the NHS cannot "do everything, or as much as we are currently doing, in acute hospitals."
Hewitt's plans would replace our NHS with a shambolic and largely experimental market system, which will pump out increased profits to private shareholders at taxpayers' expense, while leaving those with the most serious and urgent health needs facing the closure of local hospitals and specialist services.