ONLY five weeks ago – and doesn’t it seem longer? – the National Health Service was at the centre of general election debates.

Each party was promising to spend billions more on it - just as successive governments have done over the last three or four decades.

Yet there has been no let-up in in bad news about the NHS since the election. There have been problems with the main trust running health in Brighton and with the trust in charge of Sussex mental health services.

Over in Eastbourne and Hastings, there have been calls for the chairman and chief executive to resign - which at the time of writing have been stoutly resisted.

The trouble is that too many people look at health through rose-tinted NHS glasses. They expect an organisation created in times of great hardship to have adapted to an era of prosperity and diseases of affluence.

There are constant calls for more funding, even though the NHS is a bottomless pit, while clinging to the romantic notion that it should be free to everyone.

The truth is that the NHS was never entirely free from the start in 1948 when health minister Nye Bevan caved into the doctors, allowing them to carry on doing some private work.

For most of its long life, the NHS has made charges for prescriptions and levied often substantial sums for dental services.

Nearly all people agree that if someone is seriously injured, treatment should be free no matter how rich or poor the patient is.

But why shouldn’t those able to pay be charged for the hotel aspects of hospital stays such as food and drink?

Would it be a good idea to make a modest charge for visiting the family doctor, which would bring in millions to the NHS and reduce the number of no shows?

Should the NHS be funded by an insurance scheme of the type common in continental Europe where health services often seem streets ahead of ours?

Then we come to some even more tricky questions. Should hugely expensive cancer drugs be given to terminally ill patients when they will only prolong an already poor quality of life for a few months?

Should we allow extremely old, ill people who wish to die to do so without making futile and frantic efforts to keep them alive?

Ought we to be bringing very premature babies in the world knowing they will almost certainly suffer from severe health problems throughout their lives?

There is also a myth about NHS managers. Many people seem to think the biggest organisation in the world with more than a million employees can somehow run without them?

Managers are constantly vilified as incompetent, greedy bureaucrats, paid vast salaries which would be better spent on nurses.

There are good and bad managers in the NHS. But the ones I know share a dedication to duty that is exemplary and are paid much less than they would be in the private sector.

My only beef about them is that too many have been forcibly retired through Government-inspired changes when they could and should have continued to work for the NHS.

Another common complaint is that the NHS is being slowly privatised and that this is evil. Yet the proportion of service provided by private firms is quite low and the quality variable.

I can tell you that if you have been near death in a hospital, as I once was in the Royal Sussex County, you do not care if the nurse caring for you is from a private firm or the NHS.

Nor do you care which of the constantly changing trusts in the NHS employs the doctor helping you to survive.

It is curious that despite our continual moaning about the NHS, most people’s actual experiences of it are good. Staff saved my life when I had malaria and have been excellent in treating my current difficulties (I won’t list them as there is nothing duller than other people’s health problems).

We should be proud of the NHS, as most of us are. But we should also accept that radical changes are needed in its financing.

Most of us need to put in more ourselves while ensuring that those who can’t afford to pay do not and that essential services are always free.

In that way we can ensure that a service designed for treating illnesses such as rickets and scarlet fever can cope with the complexities of modern medicine.