PA - The Government's NHS reforms will do "irreparable harm", a group of top doctors and health specialists have said.
More than 400 experts sent an open letter to the House of Lords urging peers to reject the coalition's controversial Health and Social Care Bill when they vote later this month.
The letter, also sent to the Daily Telegraph, said: "The Bill will do irreparable harm to the NHS, to individual patients and to society as a whole.
"It ushers in a significantly heightened degree of commercialisation and marketisation that will fragment patient care; aggravate risks to individual patient safety; erode medical ethics and trust within the health system; widen health inequalities; waste much money on attempts to regulate and manage competition; and undermine the ability of the health system to respond effectively and efficiently to communicable disease outbreaks and other public health emergencies."
The letter includes signatories from across a wide spectrum of public health practice, including over 40 directors of public health and more than 100 leading public health academics.
Its authors added: "While we welcome the emphasis placed on establishing a closer working relationship between public health and local government, the proposed reforms as a whole will disrupt, fragment and weaken the country's public health capabilities.
"The Government claims that the reforms have the backing of the health professions. They do not. Neither do they have the general support of the public.
"It is our professional judgement that the Health and Social Care Bill will erode the NHS's ethical and co-operative foundations and that it will not deliver efficiency, quality, fairness or choice. We therefore request that you reject passage of the Health and Social Care Bill."
Professor Martin McKee from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a signatory of the open letter, said: "This letter demonstrates the widespread recognition within the public health community that this Bill is bad for the NHS and harmful to the overall health of the population."
Shadow health secretary John Healey said: "David Cameron is in denial, both about the damage his plans are doing to the NHS and the strength of opposition to his Health Bill."