Recently I had reason to go along to two hospitals with someone who was having some tests. One was a private hospital, and the other was the local NHS hospital.

And both of us agreed that we vastly preferred the NHS one.

The private one had soft seats and soft lighting, and acres of waiting space. Anonymous looking doors, behind which anything medical was shut away. Mysterious figures appeared occasionally and drifted around, some of them wearing smart suits and very high heels. There was really nothing whatsoever to make you think it was a hospital rather than a hotel or some kind of waiting area in an airport on a quiet day. If you wanted a cup of tea there was a machine. A few copies of the Telegraph and the Daily Mail were placed on some seats.

The NHS one had higgledy-piggledy seats, and lots of notices pointing the direction to various medical facilities. Public health notices stuck on the walls, some with drawing pins or sticky tape. Lots of people busily dashing around, wearing a range of working uniforms – nurses, doctors, cleaners, builders - it couldn't have been anything other than a hospital.

A scatter of tattered old paperbacks were there to buy or borrow in various places, and the normal random selection of out-of date magazines. Up the end of one corridor there was the WRVS tea bar. Downstairs was the canteen shared by staff and patients and visitors. Make your own toast - and when I burnt mine, a large nurse showed me how it worked. A couple of the men working on the extension that's being put up were at the next table, looking like Bob the Builder, with their yellow safety helmets on the floor beside them.

As I said, we both agreed we vastly preferred the real hospital to the private version. And yet, I am sure that the very things that made us prefer it are very largely the very things which the people in charge would probably like to get rid of; and the very things that we didn't like about the private hospital are the very things that they would like to introduce into the NHS. They would see them as improvements. Make it more like a business selling an image, and less like a working community.