ED MILIBAND'S pledge during Labour's election campaign launch to "halt the tide of privatisation" in Britain's health service is welcome in putting some clear red water between his party and the Conservatives.

But his failure to rule out the continued use of private providers shoots his policy in the foot.

It is no exaggeration to say that the future of the NHS is at stake in this election.

Andrew Lansley's privatising Health and Social Care Act - many parts of which were written by interested private sector parties, such as management consultants McKinsey & Co - has opened the floodgates to a whole range of profiteering parasites. 

Labour's commitment to repeal the Act has been one of the principle reasons to vote for the party in May.

Our health service cannot survive another five years of fragmentation and outsourcing.

Besides, Miliband is right to note that the scale of planned Tory cuts means any promise from David Cameron to "ring fence" the health budget is not worth the paper it is written on.

Even in the current Parliament that commitment has been undermined by the demand to find £20 billion in NHS "efficiency savings" and the squandering of billions on implementing Lansley's disastrous Act.

These are combined with a host of nasty tricks such as only paying hospitals 30 per cent of the cost of treating A&E patients when admissions exceed a 2009-09 "baseline," even though A&E admissions are rising - partly due to the effects of government cuts on other areas, such as local authority budgets.

Ending privatisation in the NHS is not just the only way to ensure our citizens retain access to top quality healthcare free at the point of use - it's also an electoral no-brainer backed by almost the whole population.

Last year a record £6.6 billion was paid from the NHS budget to private providers. They are now raking in an astonishing £18 million a day, money we can ill afford as hospitals groan under crippling private finance initiative (PFI) debts.

So Miliband is right to say "the money we spend on healthcare must go on healthcare and not for excess profit for private firms."

But that subtle insertion of "excess" shows that he is failing to rule out companies continuing to leech away our money as they carve up the NHS.

A 5 per cent "profit cap" sounds feeble enough to start with. Then we learn it only applies to contracts worth over £500,000 and can be raised by NHS commissioners if they want to take account of "particular issues".

Making the NHS the preferred bidder for contracts is a definite improvement on the Tory status quo, which has seen a third of its contracts handed to the private sectors since the 2012 Act.

But why not kick the privateers out completely? Labour's proposals of a "cost-reflective tariff system" and giving commissioners the power to terminate contracts if the provider is not performing properly are full of holes.

The former will be a nightmare to police while the cosy links between companies, ministers and top civil servants will undermine the latter.

Nor was there any mention of PFI, a ruinous wheeze pursued eagerly by the previous Labour government. 

Miliband needs to bite the bullet, distance the party from the discredited policies of the Blair and Brown administrations and pledge a proper renegotiation of such contracts so hospitals are not forced to "pay back" many times the value of the original loans.

A Conservative victory in May will kill the NHS. And only a Labour majority can prevent a Conservative victory.

But on yesterday's showing, the campaign to keep our NHS public will need to be ramped up even if Miliband ends up in Downing Street.