John Healey: Cameron's crew are steering our NHS full steam ahead towards an iceberg

David Cameron and his Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, are fond of talking about how they want to increase patient choice, improve health outcomes and cut waste in the NHS, by moving budgets to family doctors. Their stated aims are sound – no one with any sense would oppose them.

But the more people see of the plans, the less they like them.

Around 90 per cent of patients' contact with the NHS comes through their GP, but responsibility for improving the quality of GPs and spotting those who don't provide the best service is being taken away from the local area and will be dealt with in Whitehall. It is hard to see how bureaucracy will be cut, when 150 bodies are being abolished, only to be replaced with over 300 new ones doing the same job. They'll have to hire exactly the same managers currently being made redundant at huge cost, or bring in private companies who are already hard-selling their services to GPs.

And introducing price competition will mean private providers undercutting hospitals in a race to the bottom as they compete to treat patients not on who can give you the best healthcare, but on who can do it cheapest.

It's this last concern that has got the least attention and is the most potentially damaging. Certainly, Ministers have not been prepared to discuss it publicly. In the past fortnight, the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary have both had articles about their NHS plans in The Times. Two articles of 700 words each – not a single mention of the word "competition".

The Government's plans for the NHS are an iceberg. The proposal to give GPs responsibility for managing services is the tip above the surface – the bit everyone can see, the bit the Tories are prepared to talk about. But the ideological bulk of the reforms lurk beneath.

Captain Cameron and First Mate Lansley are powering full steam ahead, expecting the NHS to bear the impact.

The Lib Dems are in many respects hapless, helpless bystanders when it comes to NHS policy. The Government is led by Tories – ones that believe that competition drives innovation, that price competition brings better value, that profit best motivates performance, and that the private sector is better than the public sector.

Their true intent is not set out in the arguments ministers use in public. The purpose lies in opening up all parts of the NHS to private health companies, and taking what remains of NHS away from public scrutiny. It lies in removing the "N" in NHS, so there are no consistent, comprehensive service guarantees for patients wherever they live.

It lies in cutting back the universal care the NHS provides from cradle to grave to an unspecified core of "designated" services that will have legal protection and guaranteed funding.

It is not hard to predict what damage this will do to patient care. Full scale competition replacing collaboration may mean an end to the kind of valuable and valued integration we saw under Labour, such as the networks that provide continuous care for cancer patients.

For all the election promises of protecting hospitals, patients will see them threatened with bankruptcy as private providers compete. We will see an NHS that is not so much "patient centred" as "profit centred".

That is not the spirit of the NHS and it is not what Labour wants for the NHS. Everyone saw the huge improvement in our health service that we achieved in a decade of continuous investment. Thirteen years ago we spent 35bn on healthcare. This year it was 103bn. As much as the Government tries to dismiss this as waste they cannot deny the facts, and the vast improvement we saw in care.

In 1997, there were nearly 27,000 people in Yorkshire waiting more than six months for treatment. By May of last year, that was true of just a single patient.

The NHS is facing the tightest financial settlement for more than half a century. The attention of everyone in the NHS should be on finding the efficiencies needed and reinvesting them in care for patients. Instead the Government distracting staff with its wasteful 3bn reorganisation.

We are already starting to see the signs of strain on the health service, as operations are cancelled, wards mothballed, job posts frozen and staff laid off.

The strain is already showing in Yorkshire, where the number of people waiting more than 18 weeks for treatment has started to increase from where we were in May, by as much as four per cent for some treatments.

The danger now is that the Tory-led Government's high risk, high cost plans for the NHS become law and in turn determine how the health service is run in this country.

My job as Labour's Shadow Health Secretary will be to challenge these plans, working with others who have expressed concerns, and preventing this being – as the new Chair of the Royal College of GPs recently put it – "the end of the NHS as we know it".

John healey MP is the shadow health secretary. He is also the Labour MP for Wentworth and Dearne.