On my desk before me, are three recent letters I've received from the NHS. The first says, "Your GP has asked us to book you in for routine three-yearly breast screening", and tells me where I have to be for this procedure, and when.

This seems like an odd thing for my GP to have done. He knows I have been receiving treatment for breast cancer at another hospital for a couple of years now, including annual screening. I called the hospital and asked why my GP would have made such an otiose request. They explained that my GP hadn't really had anything to do with it. That's just a form of words they use. I cancelled the appointment.

The other two letters – identical – tell me I must present myself at another hospital, four days from the date on each letter, for a pre-operative assessment. Maybe I'm a coward, but I was daunted by the idea of calling to cancel this appointment, and the breast reconstruction operation that would, all being well, follow a few days later. It felt like a lonely, frightening and irrevocable decision.

I had to tell them that I didn't want the operation at all. That was the form of words they needed. But that was a lie. Actually, I still don't know. I certainly can't have it now, because of commitments to others who urgently need my care at this point. Thing is, it's a hard and complex decision, because the surgery might not go well, and there would be further surgery. "Patient choice" means they can't actually tell me what they think would be best.

I put off this decision before, four months ago, and was put back on the waiting list. I can't keep doing this. I'm sure I won't be ready to decide in another four months, either. It's like breast-reconstruction Groundhog Day.

Ironically, there are identical, gentle threats in the two letters.

"If you fail to attend this appointment without informing us, you will not be sent a further appointment and will be discharged back to your GP." Why is this ironic? Because I'd have loved it if someone at the hospital had said: "No need to decide now. When and if you want to go ahead, just tell your GP."

I don't expect much sympathy in return for my pettish whining. On the contrary, all criticism of the NHS at this sensitive, perilous time is seen as playing into the hands of health secretary Andrew Lansley, the coalition and their hasty, without-mandate Health and Social Care Bill.

In the campaign to resist this bill, it is apparently important to subscribe to the sentimental pretence that the NHS is perfect, and that only insane or evil people could have any desire to "reform" any part of it in any way. Yet here I am turning down "free" surgery that has been offered with my best interests at heart, and complaining that no one held my hand and squeezed as I did it. I'm complaining, even though the NHS saved my life.

Except, here's the thing. The NHS did not save my life. Medical science saved my life. New drugs saved my life. New procedures saved my life. New equipment saved my life. The human progress that saved my life was the fruit of a combination of systems: some funded by the state (various states), some funded charitably, some – many – private, commercial and profit-making. The idea that the NHS currently stands apart from all this – pure, unsullied, impervious to the evil blandishments of hard-headed business – the one institution that stands single-handedly between ourselves and our preventable deaths, is utterly fallacious.

I am grateful and proud – of course I am – that the NHS provides universal access to advanced medical science, in theory, at least. In reality, inequality of access to services, with the poorest areas very much the least well-served, is long-standing and endemic. "Postcode lottery" has always seemed a terrible description of this phenomenon, ascribing it to luck and chance, not, as the World Health Organisation more truthfully put it, to the "conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age". My family is from one of the parts of the country that is, statistically, less well-served by the NHS. The NHS did not save my father's life. I'm truly not bitter (not very) about the fact that his GP treated him for indigestion until the stomach pains he'd complained of for ages drove him one Sunday to A&E, where cancer of the oesophagus, metastasised to secondary cancer of the liver, was finally diagnosed. He was told he had four months to live. The numbers were right. But Dad didn't have four months to live. He had four months to die.

I am bitter, however, about the way I behaved during that time.

Suddenly, after diagnosis, my father was besieged by nutritionists, giving advice on what he should eat and what he should drink, constantly questioning us about it, then giving further advice. (He'd never seen a nutritionist in his life before that time.) My mother became possessed by the mad idea that healthy soups would keep him with us. This was what, in our minds, the professional obsession with his diet signified.

I so regret the time I spent thinking about, buying, or preparing things I imagined he might like to eat, and trying to cajole him into swallowing them. He hated it. I wish I'd held his hand more, told him I loved him more, and why; I wish I'd relived the happy memories I had of him more, asked him about the parts of his life – his childhood, his young adulthood – that I'd heard him talk of so little, and never will hear him talk of now. He flinched, the poor sod, every time we began to hove into view, bearing a protein shake. It was cruel. It was disrespectful. It was pointless.

I oppose the health bill. I want to make that crystal-clear. Still, I am uncomfortable with all the eulogising that's going on, the strident proclamations that only evil people or dupes could imagine that there is any need for reform. There's plenty.

But the government's proposed health reforms are a lot like their higher-education reforms. They seek primarily to absolve Westminster from hard, unpopular decisions that will inevitably have to be made, one way or another, in the near future. They seek to create conditions under which these decisions can be made without political accountability. Those are the simple, basic things that are wrong with this bill, and with this government's general approach.

The Conservatives want this because it is part of their simple shrink-the-state credo. The Lib Dems want it because of their more nuanced commitment to decentralisation. I think both parties are taking dangerous risks with this precious, imperfect institution, under the inadequate intellectual fig-leaf of their broad philosophies. Many people – polls suggest the majority of us – are similarly troubled.

But my worry is that part of the reason why that message is being ignored is that it is easy to dismiss reasoned opposition – of which there has been plenty – when it is so often accompanied by a feverishly hostile, mud-slinging form of collective revisionism that insists on dramatic, romantic idealisation of the NHS. It alienates me, this tendency. I'm sure I'm not the only one.