The BBC has just concluded an inspiring series on the pioneering work of Kypros Nicolaides. His struggle to save the lives of unborn babies at King's College Hospital reflected the world-beating empathy, resource and skill on offer through the NHS, albeit in limited doses. As  Life Before Birth finished, another dramatic primetime documentary unfolded at a second London hospital.  Though the plotlines could not have been more dissimilar, Professor Nicolaides's base at King's College is not so different to A&amp;E at the Whittington, where Rose Addis was treated. In both departments, the scruffy interiors are less evocative of Nicky Haslam than Iris Murdoch. Neither is well-supplied with back copies of  Tatler. There is no sense, in either waiting-area filled with grime-pitted plastic chairs and sticky Lego bricks, that a feng shui consultant has recently passed this way.   The television cameras did not dwell either on shabby corridors or on Nicolaides's private gloom. Once, he told me recently, he went to conferences knowing that British foetal medicine was the best in Europe. 'Now I talk about the rate of death in premature babies, and people from so-called underdeveloped countries raise their eyebrows at our low standards compared to theirs,' he said. Morale among NHS staff generally was desperate.   I expect the mood was similar at the Whittington, even before Iain Duncan Smith raised the case of Mrs Addis and her alleged neglect. Since the ensuing pandemonium produced no clear evidence, it is fair to judge the hospital only on its formal record.    One recent study put the Whittington in Britain's top 40 trusts. The Government's commission for health improvements said last week that most aspects were fine but that patients had to wait too long in casualty.   The real problem is evident to any visitor. You can calibrate it in lack of staff, or queuing time, or the ratio of Hampstead liberals to Holloway drunks, but the bottom line is poverty, as endemic in the patients as in the system.   Even so, the Whittington is less awful than last week's insults suggest. King's College, for all its specialist brilliance, is more beleaguered than the flattery of the cameras implies. Two hospitals; two shifting perspectives. Why is the NHS always so misunderstood? Set aside the furore of the Addis case, with its baggage of blood-stained socks, unchanged clothes, tardy family visitors and (hastily-dropped) racism charges. The facts hardly matter, not least because there aren't many.   The real issue is why most NHS debate has become unhinged from reason. No other country behaves so emotionally, or hysterically, about healthcare. Dutch and Italian patients must blink at the rapturous hymns delivered by incapacitated British tourists who end up in their hospitals. We ship our sick off on Eurostar for operations, convinced that Lille is the new Lourdes. The French system, often touted as a model institution, is actually riven by industrial battles over pay and hours. But when GPs went on strike again last week, there was no national panic or battalions of prescription-starved grandmas storming the Elyse Palace.   While health is not to be compared with the services offered by glaziers or gasmen, attitudes to the NHS stray far beyond mere issues of life and death into the sentimental swampland of politics. To both main parties, the health service, replete with heroes and villains, is Victorian melodrama on an heroic scale. In the latest production of Temptation Sordid Or Virtue Rewarded, Duncan Smith used his odious Commons attack to smear the Whittington staff.   But Alan Milburn has also cast health professionals as villainous Sir Jaspers. Although now all public servants are Mr Blair's social entrepreneurs, I do not remember Mr Milburn offering much comfort to can-do innovators who moved bodies into an overspill hospital morgue in Bedford. Both in that confected scandal and the Alder Hey organs dbcle, ministerial interventions inflamed fury.   In an arena where cool logic should inform good stewardship, health policy looks too random and events-driven. Like rotas for cricket teas and church-hall rummage sales, it also owes a disproportionate debt to elderly women. Mr Blair's first pledge of parity with Europe and much more money was accelerated by the stories of the cancer patient, Mavis Skeet, and by Lord Winston's attack, fuelled by the treatment his sick mother had received. Now there is Mrs Addis.   Sandwiched between those events is a confetti of initiatives. Billions of pounds have been almost tracelessly absorbed into the parched terrain of the NHS. Yet ironically, just before the Whittington case, the Government might have thought it could relax. The Bristol heart deaths affair was finally over. There was, as yet, no winter beds crisis; 86 per cent of patients were happy with their treatment. The new NHS modernisation board, a forum for the influential, had just produced a report so optimistic as to be almost unbelievable.   And so it was. By Friday, the news that 5.75 million patients use NHS Direct had mutated into an Audit Commission verdict that the helplines aren't being used by the most needy and that the service is so far adrift of its targets that it is revising the aim of nearly all callers talking to a nurse in five minutes. The new goal time will be 20.   Whatever the merits of the modernisation board, the new president of the Royal College of Surgeons prefers, in an unusual gesture of independence, not to sit on it. Sir Peter Morris believes that such a role might compromise his ability to say what he believes to be true, namely, that hospitals are in a much worse mess than he would have believed possible.   But despite government spin and professional gloom, there is good news too. Labour has abandoned the myth that the NHS can ever flourish without tax rises. It now looks possible that the upper limit on National Insurance will be removed. Mr Duncan Smith thinks, conversely, that tax cuts can be combined with a better NHS. That difference explains, more cogently than any hissy fit over individuals' treatment, why Labour may create an excellent health service, why the Tories never will, and why Mr Blair therefore holds all the cards.   He should now deal a few out and see that salvation cannot be achieved while government goes into synchronised spasm at every twitch of a cubicle curtain in the Whittington Hospital or elsewhere.   The King's Fund last week recommended, rightly, that local health providers should be autonomous. This is very different from the conditional freedom Mr Milburn is offering to the tractable and obedient. More radically, the King's Fund wants a corporation, similar to the BBC, to run the health service, leaving government only to raise money and do broad-brush strategy. Sir Peter Morris has also called for the service to be severed from political diktat.   Handing the NHS over to faceless administrators strikes Ministers as crazy. They are wrong. Separation of powers is the obvious and perhaps the only way forward. What the King's Fund and Sir Peter are saying, more or less politely, has been perfectly illustrated by the histrionics of the past week. Governments, even well-intentioned ones, are not fit to run the health service.