...but is that just another easy soundbite?

A tax-funded National Health Service has many invaluable advantages. But as Enoch Powell, Minister of Health 30 years ago, shrewdly observed: "it endows everyone providing as well as using it with a vested interest in denigrating it".

Yesterday, the doctors were at it again. In the Sixties they said the NHS needed a few scores of millions on a budget of pounds 1bn amid warnings that it was collapsing. In 1974 they demanded a Royal Commission and pounds 500m on a pounds 3bn budget as the then British Medical Association secretary warned "we cannot go on like this". Yesterday the call was for an extra pounds 6bn on pounds 40bn, amid warnings that the service was going down like the Titanic.

The sum, proportionately, is always broadly the same - the gap between Britain's spending on health and that of the OECD average. It reflects the efficiency of the NHS, which makes it a bargain buy internationally.

But by conflating a clutch of horror stories with a demand for another pounds 6bn, the doctors yesterday did neither themselves nor their patients a service.

This year is financially very tight. After years of generous settlements to get the NHS reforms in, a fierce squeeze is on. Stephen Dorrell, the Secretary of State for Health, may have miscalculated. He may yet have to go back to the Treasury for more cash. But the realistic gap this year is at most a few hundred million, not pounds 6bn.

By indulging in hyperbole, the doctors risk destroying the very thing they claim to be defending - the public's faith in the NHS and with that, the service itself. Their patients deserve better.

Trouble Ahead? Health

Service, Second Section