Doctors' leaders warned yesterday of a rash of NHS hospital closures after the next election as foreign healthcare corporations scoop up more contracts to treat patients from the waiting list.

The British Medical Association said the government was engaged in a covert programme to privatise the health service under the guise of giving patients more choice. As treatment switched to the foreign-owned companies, some NHS hospitals would go to the wall, senior doctors forecast.

The annual conference of hospital consultants gave overwhelming support to motions condemning the government for encouraging the private providers and warning of a dumbing down of standards in the NHS.

Their representatives were in an angry mood after comments by John Reid, the health secretary, that smoking was one of the few pleasures left for the poor on sink estates and should not be condemned by the well-meaning middle class. They were also upset by the failure of many inner-city NHS trusts to implement the new contract they agreed with Mr Reid soon after he took on the health portfolio last summer.

But the BMA's main fire was directed at the government's decision to award contracts worth £2bn over five years to private healthcare consortiums, mainly under foreign control.

Anna Athow, a surgeon from Preston, said: "The market is going to be used to break the NHS apart and allow private providers to take over large chunks of the NHS in Britain. This will produce the biggest hospital closure programme ever - after the election. It will spell the end of the NHS and it must be stopped."

Jackie Davis, a radiologist at the Whittington hospital, London, accused ministers of "a cynical hijacking of patient choice as a smokescreen for the government's intention to privatise the NHS".

Paul Miller, chairman of the BMA consultants' committee, said: "We are concerned about the notion that a GP will be able to tap a button on a computer and get a list of hospitals nearby with the shortest lists."