As good news stories go, it doesn’t get much better. Edinburgh is to be the first city in the UK to get a pioneering CT scanner which will capture 3-D images of entire organs in the blink of an eye, using 80% less radiation than conventional scanners. The Aquilion One scanner, which will assist doctors to diagnose cancer and heart disease at a much earlier stage, is part of a £4m bequest from the Royal Bank of Scotland.

This technology is so cutting edge it makes the space shuttle look like the Sinclair C5. But this is Scotland where we can spot the cloud in the most dazzling of silver linings. Thus has the story of the RBS’s generosity turned into a row about the future of the NHS. As part of its bequest, the bank, which will pay for the maintenance and staffing of the machine for five years, will have access to the scanner 25% of the time for its employees.

Professor Allyson Pollock, head of the Centre for International Public Health Policy at Edinburgh university, condemned the “privileged access” of RBS staff and said the deal undermined the NHS principle of equal access to services on the basis of need. Melanie Cox, group secretary of the Patients Information Centre has also condemned the “preferential treatment” of the bank’s employees.

The gift has led to claims that the bank is undermining the founding principle of the NHS. Good. It’s about time someone did. If ever there was a shibboleth that needed to be scuppered or a sacred cow that needed slaughtered it is the “founding principle” of the NHS, an unchallengeable premise that has sheltered apathy, lethargy and mediocrity for decades.

It is the “founding principle” of the NHS which leads to your routine operation being cancelled for the eighth time to make way for emergency surgery until you realise, with growing despair, that the only way you will be seen is when you become an emergency yourself. It is the “founding principle” of the NHS which sees you sitting with a sick child in Accident and Emergency on a Saturday night from midnight until 3am while a succession of foul-mouthed drunks, who have arrived after you, are treated before you. It is the “founding principle” of the NHS which equates the life of a young mother of four with that of a 90-year-old. It is the “founding principle” of the NHS which dictates that you cannot get the experimental cancer drug which might prolong your life long enough to see your child graduate. It is the “founding principle” of the NHS which ensures that, however much politicians bang on about patient choice, you have to endure a one-size-fits-all service.

If the NHS were a car, it would be a clapped-out Ford Fiesta and we would all be forced to drive it. If it were a destination, it would be Scunthorpe and we would all be forced to holiday there. If it were food it would be a Spam fritter served up three times a day.

I don’t want to see the NHS abolished or dismantled. I know how heroic the staff are. But I also know how many of them struggle in dilapidated buildings with machinery that is out of date. I know of patients who have been sent home because vital radiotherapy machines have been broken or diagnostic scopes have been out of commission. In any other area of life, you’d find an alternative but in the NHS that’s not possible. You might be dying of cancer but you still wait your turn.

What really angers me is the way politicians and doctors such as Pollock insist on venerating this outdated model of healthcare safe in the knowledge that if they fell ill, the best treatment would be available to them. When was the last time you read about a first minister or a professor of medicine waiting for hours in a dingy corridor or on a hospital trolley?

The two great myths of the NHS are that it is a national service and it is the same for all. There is nothing national about the health service. It is as federalised as the Balkans and many Scots are living in the medical equivalent of Albania. Nor is it the same for all. If you get lung cancer in Aberdeen, you have a much higher chance of survival than if you get it in Lanarkshire. If you are articulate and know what to ask for, you will get access to treatments which you might not otherwise have received.

By elevating the “founding principle” of the NHS over all other considerations, we have failed to allow the NHS to develop into a service fit for the 21st century. In every other area of life people are allowed to exercise real choice and decide their own priorities. Only in the NHS are they treated like the inhabitants of a communist state, expected to pay homage to an ideal which is constantly failing them.

Far from condemning the Royal Bank of Scotland we should be encouraging more of these private/public partnerships. As for criticising the conditions of the bequest, all philanthropy comes with conditions. Scholarships are not open to all. Recipients of charitable bequests have to meet specific conditions. Such strings ensure a measure of accountability.

Nobody loses out from the bank’s terms. If 1,000 RBS employees use the scanner each year as is likely, a sizeable number of people who might otherwise need a conventional scan, are removed from the system, thus speeding it up for the rest of us. The notion that if I can’t have it, nobody should is a depressingly Scottish one.

When Maggie Keswick was diagnosed with terminal cancer, her doctor in Dumfries advised her not to play the system but to enjoy the few months she had left to live. She was an heiress but the “founding principle” of the NHS decreed that she waited her turn with the same degree of fatalism as everyone else. She didn’t listen. Instead she used all her connections and money to find the best treatment available internationally. She got another two years of life as a result, two years which made a huge difference to her teenage children and which allowed her to develop and fund the first Maggie’s Centre, a legacy which has benefited thousands of Scottish cancer patients.

When it comes to the survival of someone you love, principles count for little. As I type this I can’t help but think of a friend, the mother of three children, the youngest of whom is seven. Her cancer was diagnosed late and I can’t help wondering if the CT scan could have made a difference. The company she works for? The Royal Bank of Scotland.