TODAY'S People's Convention for the NHS comes not a moment too soon.

Unless we step up the resistance, we may not have a recognisable health service in a few years. 

The immediate threat comes from the Conservatives, a party that has always been hostile to public services provided free at the point of use and which in office has pushed through the most damaging programme of fragmentation and outsourcing the NHS has ever seen.

Prime Minister David Cameron lies when he said there would be no "top-down reorganisation" of the NHS if he was elected to office.

Andrew Lansley's 2012 Act, which removed the Secretary of State's responsibility for the service and opened a Pandora's Box of privatisation, was just such a reorganisation - and one which the Tories were careful to keep out of their manifesto.

Current Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt co-authored a book in 2005, Direct Democracy, which called for "denationalising the provision of healthcare in Britain."

The other author was Daniel Hannan MEP, who described the NHS as a "60-year mistake" on US television.

This "mistake" means that everyone in this country, in stark contrast to the United States with its tens of millions uninsured, has a right to top quality care irrespective of how rich or poor their are.

The NHS has repeatedly been judged the best health system in the world. The Commonwealth Fund survey of healthcare in 11 developed countries in 2011 put us top in nine of 12 categories.

It was also among the least expensive, with Britons paying $3,405 (£2,325) per heard per year. The US private insurance model costs its citizens $8,508 (£5,800) and even the insurance-based systems of France and Germany cost more than our taxpayer-funded approach.

None of this mattered to the Conservatives, who failed to win in 2010 ad were forced to go into coalition with the Liberal Democrats in order to carry out their war on public services and the workers who deliver them.

This wasn't a problem, since Nick Clegg had called even before he became Lib Dem leader for the NHS to be "broken up" and replaced with a European-style insurance approach.

And the tentacles of marketisation had been creeping into our health service even before the Con-Dem coalition was formed, with Labour toying with private provision and, disastrously, crippling our hospitals with PFI debts they can never repay.

The NHS has not "failed" by any international comparison. But starved of investment, saddled with debt, bullied or bribed into outsourcing services, it has been set up to fail.

Its heroic workers are trapped in a constant battle to provide life-saving care to those who need it, all while facing chronic staffing shortages and working shifts of a length seen in few other industries and legislated against in many.

The reason for this has been clear ever since 2010, when KPMG head of healthcare Mark Britnell - a former top director in the NHS would be shown "no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years."

Health insurance across the Atlantic is big, big business. The profits that could be made from health in this country are too tempting for corporate fat cats to resist. 

If they get their way, we will all pay the price. All the best to today's convention - and let's build a movement that will safeguard our health service for decades to come.