In Whitehall, the common assumption is that the Government has got only one of two years left to make the NHS work or else the public will just stop believing the government is capable of doing the job.

Amidst this, the complacent self-congratulation of Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, in her speech yesterday and Sir Nigel Crisp, the NHS chief excutive, is simply irritating to those who know the situation on the ground.

Yes, the waiting list has been reduced to 800,000 - a long way below its 1,300,000 peak. But the median or average waiting time has been reduced very little. And the figures cannot be trusted these days. Hospital trusts have been leaned on to reduce their lists by fair means or foul. The numbers treated on the waiting list have not risen either. And then there is the waiting list to get on the waiting list, not to mention the distortion of priorities.

A surgeon in Hampshire recently was boiling with fury as he told me that the previous weekend he had twelve people in his hospital with broken bones. They were waiting to be operated upon - anxious, dosed heavily with pain killers and unable to get up to go to the loo. But the management of the hospital still brought him people on the waiting list for hip replacements and the like ahead of those with broken bones. All common sense and humanity towards those in most urgent need were jettisoned so that people like Patricia Hewitt could boast about waiting lists.

Another grotesque little trick deployed by government propagandists is to say that more people are being cured of cancer or heart disease. They know - or should know - that such improvements have been going on for years in Britain and other countries. Still Britain has probably the worst overall record in treating cancer and heart disease of any advanced country.

After all the extra money that has been thrown at the NHS, there have indeed been some, modest improvements. But we have not got a decent bang for our bucks. We have only got a squeak. And now, with Gordon Brown's luck running out, the extra money will soon be arriving in smaller dollops. A new report from Reform, the think tank, argues that the squeeze will get even worse because the NHS is training a new regiment of doctors without having the budget to employ them all. It will also need to fund new drugs and hospital buildings. Reform suggests there will be a £7 billion deficit.

How on earth can it be that so much money has been thrown at the NHS for such a limited progress? Where has all the cash gone?

Approaching a third has gone on increased pay for existing staff. Of course, we could say that they deserved the money. Perhaps they even needed it if they were not to leave the NHS altogether. But pay increases evidently do not, of themselves, cause the service to improve. That is achieved by making the staff''s work more productive, through better working practices and use of technology.

Much money has been spent on recruiting new staff. Some have indeed been doctors and nurses but the numbers of support and administrative staff have increased at a much faster rate. Even before, the NHS used four times as many administrative and support staff per nurse than private sector hospitals. Now the administrative superstructure is even bigger.

Again and again, only a small minority of the extra money actually gets through to the front line. The waste is terrible - with wards closed, expensive scanners used only part of the time and consultant surgeons standing around waiting for patients to be ready for their operations. Even Patricia Hewitt herself admits that productivity in the NHS is improving at no more than one per cent a year.

We have had a great experiment in these past few years. It was a test of whether the NHS could become a first class health system if enough money was put into it. The people of this country were prepared to give it a go. They paid up the money - and will be expected to pay more. But it looks as though, at the end of all this, they will have an NHS that is still not top class and has a funding crisis to boot. The NHS is the most state-run health system in the advanced world and it still has probably the worst treatment records. Surely it is an idea whose time has gone.

(The above is the unedited version of an article that appears in today's Daily Express.)