Poll: Are you optimistic over the future of the NHS?

It has been revered ever since, so universally worshipped it took centre stage at the opening of the London Olympics in 2012.

Nobody dares meddle with the National Health Service because, we tell ourselves, it is the envy of the world.

But it isn't the envy of the world. Many countries pity us because our health service is so poor.

Its supply of doctors, nurses and other medical staff, let alone its supply of facilities, seems incapable of meeting the ever-growing demand for its services.

Occasionally politicians start to tinker with the monolithic apparatus of the £113 billion-a-year NHS. They never get very far because their attempts are thwarted.

Their enemies are not just the trade unions or the doctors. Their enemies include patients who assume any kind of change in the way the service is run must be for the worse.

Their enemies also include tradition – we have always done it this way so why should we change? – and lethargy – it's simply too much trouble and the benefits from change won't be worth the effort.

Yet if you talk to just about anyone who works in the NHS, from nurses and doctors to administrators or ambulance-drivers, it is crystal clear the system cannot cope.

It isn't just a question of money. Politicians can pour ever-larger sums into the NHS and, of course, there will be some improvements. But they won't represent anything like decent value for money.

So this winter, as in every winter but especially a winter preceding a General Election, the NHS is in crisis.

David Cameron has thrown another £150 million at the problem in a bid to prevent damaging headlines.

But accident and emergency departments are still overflowing, ambulances are still queuing to deposit patients at their doors and doctors are still complaining there is more work than they can cope with.

One of their latest demands – a perfectly reasonable one, it seems to me – is that drunks should be thrown into police cells overnight rather than dumped at A&E where they take up too much time and effort which could be devoted to more serious and deserving cases.

That would be one short solution to an immediate problem but it won't make much difference to the greater difficulty which is that the NHS today is simply not, as they say, fit for purpose.

It was devised during the Second World War and launched in an era of austerity when life-expectancy was low and it was naively assumed free treatment would lead to healthier people and, thus, reduced demand for medical resources. Instead, it led to increased demand, higher costs, new innovations in medicine, greater life-expectancy and more complicated illnesses.

The NHS has been a massive boon to this country. It has helped to keep us alive for longer. It has treated people who might once have suffered misery and privation. It has maintained the noble principle that each life is as valuable as any other.

Yet for all this success, it is now close to breakdown. It may be the health service simply tries to do too much. It may be the very fact that its services are free means we don't understand or value what it provides for us. We take it for granted and assume it will cure us of all our ills.

It may simply be that an organisation set up to look after about 48 million people is not capable of catering for a growing population now numbering 64 million.

It would be insane to run one of the biggest organisations in the world, with 1.7 million employees, in the same way today as it was run in 1948. Yet that's what we are still trying to do.

Politicians vie with each other to claim the health service is safe in their hands. So they never address its fundamental flaws or come up with comprehensive proposals for reform.

This is the 21st century but we are still struggling on with an organisation built for the middle of the 20th.

Of course it has changed over the years. Indeed, some NHS professionals complain it is subjected to perpetual change – no sooner has one 'reform' been introduced than something else is imposed on them.

But the more it changes, the more it stays the same.

No politician dares to ask the simple question: What should a 21st century health service look like? To do so would be to invite the wrath of the unions, medical professionals and patients. It won't win votes.

Yet unless someone is prepared to take on that great challenge, our health service will remain on a stretcher, in a corridor, slowly expiring as it waits for an expert to diagnose its problems and suggest a cure.