There's always going to be problems if the NHS starts being all about the money.
So are you therefore saying that we should just present the NHS with an open paycheque and fight every illness, and every disease, with every treatment possible?
If thats the case, I assume you are happy for the standard rate of income tax to rise to a stupid level, say 40% or more? At present, the NHS is about money, they have a set budget, they have postcode lotteries, and they have x drugs are available and x drugs are too expensive etc...
However the current NHS and the way it allocates its spending (and the way it goes about deciding how to allocate spending), is out of control, and personally, id like to see us move more towards a US style of healthcare; maybe I would then no longer have to see upto 60% of patients missing appointments in each surgery, if they had to pay for the privaledge of them!! We already have to pay for our dental treatment, yet that is NHS, so why not other forms of healthcare? We have dental insurance to lessen/prevent the bills of dental treatment, so why not other forms of healthcare? We have charges for NHS prescriptions! Unfortunatly in the UK, everyone has an attitude that the state will pay for everything for them, from music lessons to the cost of babies/kids (in the form of benefits and tax credits) etc, so the charging of the healthcare will never happen.
As for those who think this is the end of the NHS... what exactly is wrong with that idea anyway? The NHS from top to bottom, is, and has been, for the mostpart, an inefficient, and unviable shambles, and any change which leads to better patient care has got to be embraced. Even things down the systems and procedures, are inefficient, and only 1 in 3 staff are actually medical staff, the rest are admins and the like, in jobs for life, with little/no concern about underperforming and generally lazy staff (something ive witness at first hand every day). There are not enough medical staff in the NHS, but there are far too many non-medical staff in the NHS, thats for sure.
You simply can't feasibly control an organisation as large as the NHS with a single set of rules and procedures, you can't manage staff from the top and expect them to remain efficient and working for their jobs, you can't generalise each patient condition and allocate x-money to x-problem without taking into account the local area's needs first. Government should not be responsible for running the NHS, it should be responsible for funding it and overseeing the regulation of it, ensuring there is a competitive enviroment, one in which both the patient gets an acceptable level of healthcare, and the taxpayer sees value for money (and by value, I don't mean the cheapest, I mean the best possible care for the money spent), and that is it.