A £30bn NHS funding blackhole will not be filled by politicians' promises of extra cash, an influential coalition of doctors, nurses and medical charities has warned.
Each of the three main parties pledged to make the health service their priority during their annual conferences.
But an open letter to the party leaders, published by the Independent, told them patients were suffering increasingly from "the longest, and most damaging budget squeeze" in NHS history - which had left it at "breaking point".
They said health spending has been protected from the austerity cuts imposed across most departments but had not risen enough to prevent the hospitals and surgeries "buckling under the twin crises of rising demand and flatlining budgets".
The letter was signed by the heads of the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of GPs and four other royal colleges, the Alzheimer's Society, the Anthony Nolan Trust, the MS Society, the Royal National Institute of Blind People, the Teenage Cancer Trust, the Family Doctor Association and the Faculty of Public Health.
They wrote: "Savings have been made, and despite the best efforts of nurses, doctors and other staff, patients have not been insulated from these cuts.
"Too many staff feel undervalued and demoralised when all they want is to be able to care for patients.
"A shortage of GPs means that patients are struggling to get an appointment to see their doctor. Pressures on maternity services mean that many women are not getting the high quality care they deserve."
The letter said accident and emergency unit targets were being missed - in some cases for an entire year - and that patients faced "unacceptable" waits for cancer diagnoses.
It added that patients requiring emergency mental health support were being moved to hospitals hundreds of miles away from home.
And dementia sufferers "have been cut adrift, reliant on unpaid and unsupported carers to live from day to day", according to the group, which said social care shortfalls were storing up problems for the future by a failure to invest properly in children's mental health.
"The NHS and our social care services are at breaking point and things cannot go on like this," they wrote.
"An NHS deficit of £30 billion is predicted by 2020 - a funding black hole that must be filled.
"While we welcome the fact that the NHS has risen to the top of the political agenda, and some new spending commitments have been made, we need a comprehensive, fully costed, long-term spending plan if an NHS true to its founding principles of universal healthcare, provided according to need not ability to pay, is secured for future generations."
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