Most people believe that money should be no object when drugs and treatments are given to NHS patients, according to an opinion poll.

Forty per cent of those surveyed felt that money should be no object if the drugs or treatments on offer were proven to work, while 31% said they believed that all drugs and treatments should be available regardless of cost or effectiveness.

Richard Brooks, of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which commissioned the survey, said: "We should all have high expectations of the NHS, but we need to recognise its limits as well.

"At the moment politicians of all parties collude in the fiction that everyone can have the latest treatments and the best possible care, regardless of the cost."

The government has argued that its NHS reforms - such as increasing the choice of treatment providers and arranging for more services to be delivered outside hospital - are the best way of ensuring that services match rising public expectations, since unprecedented levels of extra investment cannot be sustained in the long term.

But today's findings suggest that the majority of the public think that people are not concerned by rising drugs bills.

Overall, 72% said that they believed that value for money should not be a factor when determining NHS treatments, with that figure rising among those on lower incomes.

The survey, conducted by Ipsos Mori, the market research company, comes in the wake of controversy over the much-vaunted but expensive breast cancer drug Herceptin. The drug was made available on the NHS last month for women in the early stage of the disease after Barbara Clark, a cancer patient from Somerset, threatened to take her case for Herceptin to the high court.

Health campaigners say that a raft of other drugs are being denied to patients because they are too expensive.

The IPPR said that the government had to explain to patients why the health service had to work within its means. Education, not privatisation or private insurance, was the key to ensuring public expectation matched the reality of state provision, the left-leaning thinktank said.

The survey also showed that patients expected to be treated more quickly than the government's target waiting times of 48 hours for a GP appointment and four hours for accident and emergency.

Almost two-thirds of those surveyed said that they would expect to see their GP in a day or less if they had a bad chest infection and two in three thought that a suspected broken wrist should be seen to in two hours or less in accident and emergency.

Nearly half would expect an outpatient appointment for a non-serious back problem in two weeks or less.

Separate figures published today show a reduction in long waiting times for inpatient hospital treatment, with just 46 patients still waiting more than six months to be admitted.

The number of patients waiting more than three months for treatment has dropped by over a quarter in the past year, with 178,0000 still in the queue, and the number of people waiting more than two months for treatment has almost halved since last year (down 44%).

The reduction of waiting times, one of the government's key targets, has been blamed by NHS managers for fuelling the health service's deficit, which has forced hospitals to ration services and lay off staff.

Although health spending had tripled under Labour since 1997, the rise looked set to slow under Gordon Brown's pending shake-up of Whitehall spending, the IPPR pointed out.

Richard Brooks, associate director of the IPPR, said: "If Patricia Hewitt [the health secretary] is serious about giving people more control over their health care, then she needs to explain that there are limits to what a publicly-funded health service can deliver.

"If David Cameron [the Conservative leader] is serious about his commitment to the NHS, then he needs to engage in a debate about how care should be rationed.

"The public needs to understand that value for money means doesn't just mean efficiency, it means hard decisions over drugs and treatments too."

A Department of Health spokesman said that the NHS had to "reform further" to satisfy rising expectations.

"The record extra money invested into the NHS has delivered the fastest-ever access to care, but rising expectations and new drug treatments mean the pressures on the NHS are ever greater.

"System reform, greater productivity and investment in prevention are the routes to a sustainable NHS for the long term, especially in the context of an ageing population and rapidly advancing medical science."