Who'd want to be Andrew Lansley right about now? He's as popular as Joseph Kony. Wherever he goes people immediately start shouting at him. Old ladies scream the word "codswallop!" in his face as he walks down the street. When he visits a hospital, doctors follow him around bellowing: "Your bill is rubbish." Last week I flipped on the TV just in time to catch footage of his official car speeding away from a bunch of booing protesters, and for a moment I naturally assumed I was watching a news report about a despised killer being whisked away from a court appearance.

If these things were happening to you or me, we'd probably cry, or at least look slightly troubled. Yet no matter how many people are bellowing at him, Lansley perpetually wears the nonchalant expression of a man killing time by humming cheerfully in a lift. Presumably he has now become so accustomed to the sound of loudly heckled abuse, he doesn't even hear it any more. I guess to him it's like a noise made by some weird machine in his workplace, a background soundtrack he tunes out subconsciously. The protesters' plaintive ape wails of despair simply bounce off him like rice grains flicked at a rock. For a man who recently conducted a high-profile "listening exercise", he's got a shitty set of ears.

What is it about Lansley that makes human beings hate him so much? It might have something to do with the suspicion that he's hell-bent on turning the NHS into a commercial free-for-all, which for some reason isn't going down well at a time when terrifying nightly warnings about the worst excesses of capitalism are broadcast in the guise of news bulletins. The theory is that introducing an element of competition will improve the level of quality and range of choice for patients. And it doubtless would, if businesses behaved like selfless nuns, which they don't. Any business that wants to succeed has to cut corners somewhere to turn a profit. It also has to juggle a strange set of priorities, which means if you entrust your health to a corporation, the cost of your kidneys could end up being weighed against the spiralling cost of the CGI budgerigar voiced by Joan Collins they want for their new TV commercial.

Can you think of a single company you'd trust to slice you open and fiddle with the squishy components? Apple, maybe? After all, its products are brilliantly designed – but more importantly for a medical procedure, they're sterile. But consider the length of the cable on your iPhone charger. Annoyingly short, isn't it? Almost as short as the battery life. That's two savings right there that have been passed on to you, the consumer, in the form of minor inconveniences. In medical terms, it's like being left with a slight limp because the surgeon needed to finish at five on the dot. And let's not dwell too much on allegations about the factory where the iPhone is actually made. If these are true, and Foxconn were running the hospital kitchen, everything would taste slightly of tears. You'd be lying in bed, eating food that had been wept in, vainly waiting for that limp to heal while feverishly inserting coins into a slot to stop the bed automatically tipping you on to the floor to make way for the next customer.

I spent a fair bit of time last week visiting someone laid up in hospital. Every bed on the ward had a flat-screen TV beside it – a commercial entertainment system upon which you can watch TV or endure movies such as Captain America or Transformers: Dark of the Moon. There was a constant looping advert for these and other delights, interspersed by the now-notorious talking head shot of Lansley dribbling on about how your health is really important to him. He says he hopes this entertainment system will make your stay more enjoyable. And it will, if you pay for it.

If you pick up the remote and select good old vanilla BBC1, you only get to glimpse a few seconds of BBC1 before it displays a screen telling you to cough up. If the company responsible for the system genuinely wanted to make everyone's stay more comfortable, they'd let you have the BBC for nothing. Chances are you pay your licence fee. They could give you the Beeb and then charge extra for the movie channels. Seems reasonable. But no. Cough up, fleshbag.

On the back of the screen is a sticker telling you to switch your mobile phone off. But fear not: the screen has a phone attached to it, which your distressed relatives can use to get in touch with you. It's a premium rate number. So cough up again, fleshbag.

The screens are switched on by default, so I assume, incidentally, that the company responsible covers the cost of all that electricity. Otherwise, you're indirectly coughing up for it already, fleshbag.

Lansley claims he's not out to privatise the NHS of course, but no one believes him, partly because all the talk about clinical commissioning groups is impenetrable jargon, but mainly because the nation's doctors start running around setting off klaxons and screaming whenever he appears. As a general rule of thumb, when a doctor starts yelping with alarm, I worry. So would anyone. The government expects us to ignore medical advice. After all, that's what they're doing. Because they're deluded.