An influential committee of MPs warned today that the government's demand for a £20 billion NHS budget cut risks a health and social care meltdown.
The health select committee said that such huge savings had never been achieved anywhere in the world and meeting them would pose "a significant challenge."
It warned that deep cuts to services were inevitable if the four-year target was not achieved through "greater efficiency."
"The government's plans for health and social care are based on assumptions which will test these services to the limit," said the committee's Tory chairman Stephen Dorrell MP.
"There is no precedent for efficiency gain on this scale in the history of the NHS.
"Nor has any precedent yet been found of any health-care system anywhere in the world doing anything similar."
And campaign group Health Emergency chairman Geoff Martin warned the savage cuts enforced on NHS trusts would "obliterate" patient care, leading to massive reductions in bed capacity and staffing levels as well as a new wave of casualty and maternity ward closures.
NHS unions also seized on the committee's findings.
Unite general secretary Len McCluskey argued that the Tory-led body's findings revealed "deep qualms that even seasoned Conservatives are showing towards the coalition's helter-skelter plans to reorganise the NHS."
And Unison warned that the coalition's plans to push through reorganisation in both social care and the NHS posed "a huge danger for services and the people who rely on them."
"The last thing patients, staff and health trusts need now is a chaotic reorganisation that has not been properly thought through or costed," said Unison general secretary Dave Prentis.
However a Department of Health spokeswoman claimed that massive budget cuts forced onto the NHS by the coalition were not optional but a necessity.
