"The NHS is over; we're all going to be rich. They have really pissed on their chips this time." My registrar is in a particularly bad mood: he has just seen the health minister on TV, accusing doctors of being greedy for not accepting the new consultants' contract. I look around the drab on-call room. It is not easy doing a day's work, working the whole night and then working the whole of the next day. Working 33 hours in a row makes you feel shit: it makes you split up with your girlfriend, it loses you your mates, it stops you going out and it makes you crap at your job. It's illegal, except that the government got some special dispensation to exempt us from European employment law. And it's cruel. You just need more doctors. So train more doctors.

So why have we always done it? Not for the money: my basic salary is £23,000 and I'll send you a photocopy of my payslip to prove it. We do it because we have a collective Mother Teresa complex and, to be honest, because it feels good to work insanely hard, but to know that you are doing a good job for society, and that you are appreciated for it.

But when people start to be rude about us on telly, when we are all made to look like the minority who practise badly, when patients are over-demanding and rude to us in casualty and in GP surgeries, then that's it. I'm telling you, with the mood every doctor in the country is in, this is the end of the NHS, the greatest state healthcare system in the world, which we were all truly proud to work in.

And get this: with the attacks on doctors in the media, and patients' temper tantrums in casualty at three in the morning, the NHS will be killed forever, not by some restructuring or government policy, but by sheer, simple, old-fashioned rudeness. It's not ironic, it's stupid and sad.

So this is what happened with the new contract. We are not greedy. We did not go to the government demanding more money. They came to us and told us we had to stop doing private practice, and be available to work until 10pm and over the whole weekend for the entirety of our working lives, until we retire. And we told them to forget it. You would too.

In one hospital where I used to work, the surgeons say they are all going to leave the NHS, en masse, and set up private chambers like lawyers. And you know how expensive lawyers are. I've never heard doctors talk like this before. The irony is, these are people who used to stay late every day, working way beyond their contracts out of a sense of duty to the country and their patients. That's over. Applications to medical school are down for the first time, and doctors are haemorrhaging out of the profession to do other jobs.

Now I don't blame patients for being rude. Sometimes. I've had patients threaten to hit me because they have been kept waiting in A&E. I have had patients pull out video cameras to film my explanation of why the consultant is too busy to come and personally give the explanation for an operation (he was in the theatre battling against waiting lists). I know it can be frightening to wait in casualty, because I've done it. I know it's irritating to wait two weeks for an appointment. And for years you've been made to feel like consumers instead of citizens, so you are going to be demanding. But people have got to be civil. It is not the doctors' fault. And we're human too.

Hospitals in big cities, especially London, have huge nursing bills now, because the wages were so unworkably low for so long that half the NHS nurses left, and were replaced by agency staff on twice the money. Your money. In many parts of the country, in some specialties, consultant posts are empty: because it is a great job, but it is a difficult job, and it looks like nobody wants to do it for the money being offered.

Those empty posts are filled with agency doctors, and they get £180,000 a year. Which is what doctors get in Europe; you don't even want to think about doctors' bills in the US. You could have had doctors for a quarter of that. We didn't ask for the money. But it looks as if £180,000 is the going rate for the job since we started being attacked on the TV. I hope you all enjoy paying it as much as we will enjoy spending it. Bring it on, Alan Milburn.