The NHS can be saved. We just have to decide how to do it.

month-long inquiry into the health service - touching, sometimes hair-rising - has shown how much we value it and want to keep it free

What did we find? A great wall of warm humanity, kindness, suffering, fear, anxiety, hilarity, pain, dedication and often intense frustration.

For a month, in our biggest ever project, the paper has dived deep within the NHS, exploring its wards and operating theaters, watching community mental nurses, psychiatrists, health visitors, GPs, brain surgeons, occupational therapists and midwives, observing heroic skills and simple good daily care.

We who often write about NHS politics and finance, and track its fiendishly complex reorganizations, were taken aback and touched to the heart to be reminded what a wonderful thing our health service is. How devoted are most of its staff most of the time, and how often they care far beyond mere duty as they see people through the worst white-knuckle crises - or ease them into an inevitable end. In our "The day the NHS saved my life" series, patients told breath-stopping, tear-welling stories of rescue from deadly peril. 

World-weary cynics might say, "They would, wouldn't they?" Everyone in mortal fear clutches the hand of a nurse. Now God is dead, doctors are our saviors. To them we transfer that overwhelming rush of gratitude at being alive. But they're only doing their jobs and some are not caring enough - rough, busy or crassly insensitive. 

Jeremy Hunt stresses careless mistakes among the million treatments a day, with a scoreboard on his office wall listing "never events" of human error. Who would boast about NHS cancer survival rates, low among comparable countries? But that's not the general view. Every poll confirms emotional bonds for the NHS that are as strong as the day it was born.

Some 90% are adamant that it stay free to all, paid from taxes. Watching the work of the northernmost GP in Shetland, who doubles as emergency cliff rescuer, or the obesity clinic that deals with underlying traumas, it's easy to see why the NHS earns such support.

Free, all this is free! The costliest care from world-renowned consultants, rescue by air ambulance, or the latest diagnostic test are free for everyone. How easily we take that for granted. They may be obese, drinkers, reckless motorcyclists, smokers, gang-fighters or addicts, but whatever service is available goes to anyone, no questions asked.

The wonder of it is that spirit of equality blowing through every corridor, not a sentimental abstraction but everyday practice. Little else in this grossly unequal country is as fair as a nurse tucking crisp sheets with the same precision round a viscound or a vagrant. 

Health, though, is not fair. Within Westminster alone, life expectancy for the well-off is 20 years greater than for the poor. According to UCL epidemiologist Professor Michael Marmot's latest book, the social gradient is very precise: the less control you have over your destiny the shorter your life, and the greater your ill-health. Historic advances come less from operating tables than clean water and air, housing, warmth, education and life chances. If everyone over 30 had the same mortality as the university-educated, the number of deaths before the age of 75 would fall by half. The NHS just sweeps along afterwards.

Public anxiety about the NHS is rising - with good reason. The British Social Attitudes survey finds satisfaction down to just 60%, amid concerns over waiting times, understaffing and underfunding. Reasons given for satisfaction are the high quality of care, the range of treatments - and the fact that it's free.

Yesterday Hunt announced the imposition of a contract on the junior doctors, though twice as many voters back them as want them to work harder for no extra. Ten years of projected near-flat NHS funding, while the population rises and ages, relies on holding down staff pay, letting it fall further behind the private sector. But doctors and nurses emigrate while promises of 5,000 more GPs flounder, with falling applications. 

The 20% cut in nurse-training has contributed to 4bn pounds spent on agency temps. Expect more disputes as over-worked GPs threaten mass withdrawal. Meanwhile 8,000 beds have been cut since 2010, despite a 61% rise in 90-year-olds admitted through A&E. The gaping hole in NHS finance means no chance of keeping within planned budgets to 2020, let along saving an illusory 22bn pounds. And the tourniquet around council social care leaves more NHS beds blocked by patients waiting for community support.

The toughest squeeze since 1948 has been fatally compounded by the Health and Social Care Act, breaking the NHS into competing fragments, wasting small fortunes on complex contracts, open to potential privatization. We have reported on those trying to hold it all together, managers, finance directors, clinicians, struggling against these brutal headwinds. But the kingpin, on whom survival of the service depends, is NHS England's Simon Stevens. 

What he is attempting is a second NHS revolution - but this time quietly, below the political radar. Can he undo the damage done by Andrew Lansley? His aim is new regional health systems, binding together commissioners and providers, community services, GPs and hospitals into single units with single block contracts. Can he link dwindling council resources with NHS care - something so long tried and failed?

He intends so more constant tendering and contracting. That's how the NHS used to be before the Thatcher purchaser-provider split, before contracts and competition, as if the internal market had never been.

Can he do it without changing the law? Private firms are already protesting at block contracts that may shut them out. Stevens is known to shrug: will they try suing their prime customer? He doesn't think so. For now his writ runs, but ahead lie many trials of strength, not least with the government. Hunt didn't consult him before issuing his recent provocative warning to trusts to balance their books while keeping safe staffing, on pain of sacking their entire boards.

The greatest challenge is money. Stevens will demand more, much more, when the time is ripe. He is known to snort with indignation at ministers who claim "good care costs less". This week's last-minute bailout was only money advanced from next year and stolen from capital funds for essential repairs. Politicians will have to face the public with the truth: if they love the NHS they must pay for it.

The US Commonwealth Fund gives the NHS top marks for value for money and fairness. But expect calls for private private insurance or charging for treatment - which cost more for less. As funding falls below that of comparable countries, quality will decline. The chancellor's impossible spending straitjacket leads to political delusion, subterfuge and denial, blaming staff, managers and even patients.

All month the paper has burrowed into the data. But the daily secret diaries that have come from within, the confessions of A&E staff and the voices of patients have told the story better. Affecting and sometimes hair-raising, this has been a warm and rich reminder of how precious the National Health Service is; how proud of it we are; and how much we value its kindness and excellence, free for everyone.