A large majority of the British public are united in their support for and loyalty to a National Health Service, publically funded and therefore "free" at the point of delivery. Any threat to this concept is therefore a recipe for electoral disaster, so no overt threat is made. On the contrary David Cameron went to great pains to stress 'no top-down reorganisation of the NHS' at the 2010 election, and kept Andrew Lansley locked in a cupboard.

This is very much the 59th minute of the 24th hour for our National Health Service. Since the Health and Social Care Bill was passed in February 2012, things have moved on apace. Clinical Commissioning Groups are groups of our general practitioners assembled to buy in clinical services for their patients from "any willing providers". They have until December to come up with 'constitutions', statements of intent acceptable to the Commissioning Board, stating their acquiescence in this policy of "any willing providers". Failure to produce an acceptable constitution, i.e to do as they're told by the Commissioning Board, will result in private sector commissioning being imposed upon them. These are private healthcare companies, though from their history, of fraud and plea bargaining in the United States, 'healthscare companies', might be a more appropriate term.

Justification for pushing clinical care out to 'any willing providers', and simultaneously dis-integrating the NHS, is not supported by any statistical evidence. On the contrary, no data on private healthcare outcomes has been collected by the Department of Health, and there are no plans to do so. So much for a level playing field between public and private sectors!

Instead the only shadow of a justification rests on warm sounding terms such as "best value", "efficiency savings", and, inevitably, "patient choice". It is money driven, not quality driven. Evidence against private healthcare from the United States, including the opportunity to defraud the public purse, has been either ignored, or trashed by spin doctors. Price means, inevitably, rationing and levelling down the treatments offered to a bog standard 'basic'.

Enter the private healthcare companies, offering patients the opportunity to top up or pay an insurance premium, promising them preferential treatment. In other words, pay again to receive what one believed ones taxes had previously already paid for. This is really what 'Patient Choice' means.

During the past few months we have already been receiving junk mail from large corporate insurance companies offering these policies – "Phone our Hotline now and speak to one of our advisers".

Scotland and Wales have retained an integrated, publicly owned healthcare system. England is simply a guinea pig, a potentially lucrative hunting ground for the private healthcare companies to plunder.

We all need to support our GPs in order to stiffen their resolve against this onslaught. Lobby your GPs now for no covert privatisation of your NHS in England.

– Robert Black,Westbury on Severn.