The founder of local business moneysupermarket.com may be worth £945m but he knows that wealth without health is worthless.

"Without that, you can’t do anything," dot com multi-millionaire Simon Nixon once told me after revealing his mum died when he was just 19.

I myself lost my father more than 12 years ago now. The Yorkshire NHS made mistakes but did its best to extend his life.

And thank goodness it was there. Under a private health care system I doubt my family could have funded his treatment.

So it bothers me, not least for selfish reasons as I reach my late 40s, like Mr Nixon, that the NHS is being destabilised with the suspicion it is a deliberate ploy to ease the path for privatisation, chunk by chunk, service by service.

Simon Nixon of Moneysupermarket.com
Simon Nixon of Moneysupermarket.com

Here in West Cheshire, taxpayers’ money will soon be used to pay a private organisation to deliver abortion services currently provided on the doorstep at our local NHS hospital.

That’s because the termination service at the Countess of Chester Hospital was undermined by the former Tory-controlled Cheshire West and Chester Council who hived off a related sexual health service to another NHS Trust – that service, now based in Chester’s Fountains Medical Centre, is struggling according to its clinical lead Dr Colm O'Mahony.

Dr Colm O'Mahony

CWaC likewise chipped away at Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Trust when they handed its drug and alcohol service to the Turning Point charity despite concerns from some service users.

Councils don’t have the expertise to be involved in health care and they shouldn’t be.

But their role is growing under the Tory government’s devolution agenda. The clever ruse is to get them to make the cuts and also carry the can when the public becomes dissatisfied.

Cheshire West and Chester Council (CWaC) HQ Building in Chester

The dire consequences are that some vulnerable young women will soon be forced to traipse to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service’s (BPAS) Liverpool base to undergo one of the most traumatic procedures in their life.

And while BPAS may be a respected charity, handing over services to organisations outside the NHS is a short stepping stone away from full privatisation and services being given to profit-maximising private firms down the line. In this case, West Cheshire Clinical Commissioning Group says the service will be recommissioned early next year with the long term provider in place from September 2016.

But what we have across the NHS is a deliberately created mess. There is no strategic body overseeing and planning the health of our region any more.

And the internal market, supported by Conservative and Labour governments, means services are increasingly provided according to whether they make money for an NHS Trust rather than if they are needed.

In this fragmented and chaotic environment, private health care companies circle like sharks, eager to sink their teeth into juicy NHS contracts, but nothing too complex, nothing too costly, just the simple stuff please; the beleaguered NHS can deal with the complicated cases.

The axing of the abortion service is another sign the NHS is being slowly dismantled in front of our eyes. We need to awake from our comatose state if we are to save a treasured service on which our very lives may one day depend.