patients are being denied basic operations, including treatments for varicose veins, wisdom teeth and bad backs, as hospitals try frantically to balance the books by the end of the financial year.
NHS trusts throughout the country are making sweeping cuts to services and delaying appointments in an attempt to address their debts before the end of March.
And a new wave of cutbacks and closures seems certain to break within the NHS in the next few months as NHS bosses publish a succession of local plans for "reconfiguration" of services, many of them using the generic title "Fit for the Future".
At the forefront of the threatened closures are maternity units (up to 43 at risk or already closed according to professional groups) and Accident & Emergency units: but in many areas whole hospitals face the prospect of being downgraded from fully functioning district general hospitals with a wide range of services including emergency services and in-patient beds, to "ambulatory care" units dealing largely or exclusively with day care and outpatient treatment.
Labour ministers have swallowed a specious line of research from the Blairite "think tank" IPPR, which proposes the closure of up to 58 A&E units across England, with a concentration of emergency care in relatively few specialist units with a minimum catchment population of 500,000.
The transparently barmy IPPR proposals - which take no account of current caseload or access issues in rural areas - would axe A&E servIces in nine hospitals in Cumbria and Lancashire, SCYCLI hospitals in Northumberland Tyne & Wear and nine in London (five in North West London.
They have enlisted the naive endorsement from senior medical "experts" who seem oblivious to the implications of such cutbacks in the real world of today's NHS, but who are obsessed with the notion that those with the most serious life-threatening conditions would receive better specialist care in larger centres.
Such cases make up just 3% of the A&E caseload - while most of the remaining 97% would face a drastic worsening of care, with longer delays, longer journeys for treatment and more complex discharge from hospitals many miles from where they live.
The notion of improved care in expanded regional centres also begs the question of where the funding would come from to finance the necessary expansion and modernisation of the hospitals that remain.
Under the costly Private Finance Initiative even the newest hospitals lack any spare capacity to treat patients from outside their existing catchment area, and plans for many proposed "critical care centres" are likely to be downsized or abandoned as Trusts and the commissioning Primary Care Trusts attempt to cut back on spending and address deficits.
Epsom and St Helier in SW London, for example both seem certain to close the bulk or all of their district general hospital services - but the promised £250m PFI-funded replacement seems unlikely to make it off the drawing board.
In NE London, where the brand new £238m Queens Hospital is opening up in Romford, the Barking Havering & Redbridge hospitals Trust is facing a cumulative £43m deficit coupled with the need to pay out £36m a year for the next 30 years or more to the PFI consortium. The Trust is urgently seeking economies by downgrading the neighbouring King George's Hospital in Ilford -only completed in 1993 - to an "ambulatory care unit".
Similar and plans are being hatched up all over the country, threatening popular local services in pursuit of balanced budgets while hundreds of millions are being siphoned from NHS spending to purchase overpriced operations from a new, parasitic private sector delivering the simplest risk-free procedures in "Independent