NHS collapse

The other day, my mother - a long-standing Liberal (and latterly LibDem) voter said that she thought that the NHS was going to collapse. I found this pretty startling for someone who is a child of the fifties and has the statist mindset to match. While collapse is probably not on the cards, what I expect to happen is that public support for the NHS might give way suddenly.

Could this happen sooner rather than later? It's hard to tell, but nobody seems to be writing up the boy Cameron as a potential saviour of the NHS - he is abandoning the idea of patient passports and there seems to be an assumption that he will merely promise to run it better than Labour. This is probably the correct way to get yourself elected, but what the NHS needs is someone with a mandate to tear it to pieces.