To the European Health Policy Group, a group of academics and policymakers who meet regularly to compare European healthcare systems. But do these comparisons actually count for anything? Do they change anything?

Prof Ted Marmor at Yale School of Management says the answer is yes, unless you are American: "I doubt that in the USA today you can usefully refer to say the UK healthcare system without being accused of being a Socialist.” He says that where foreign examples are cited, the way they are presented is almost invariably a gross distortion of reality.

This lack of comparison he finds infuriating. “We have embarked on a journey (US healthcare reform) without any idea where we are going, because we have no benchmarks.”

But Marmor says that, historically, policy markers have used these comparisons. “The US social security system introduced in the 1930s was based in part on the German system. There was a lot of intercourse and discussion between German and American academics.”

In the 1990s, he said that Japan and Germany both systematically researched how other countries cared for their frail elderly before making deep reforms.

More recently, Germany imported the Australian DRG system and there is a lot of international work on Health Technology Assessment. The concept of patient choice, pioneered in Sweden and a Trojan horse for the private sector, is also spreading to the UK. The Spanish government would have implemented a similar law modelled on Sweden had it not been for the slump.

But far more could be done. Healthcare Europa is constantly coming across howling examples of bad practice which continue, year after year, when any meaningful international comparison would outlaw them.

Take. for example. the Polish habit of making doctors pay for lab tests out of their consultation fee. This is a massive inhibitor on testing with Poland commissioning seven times fewer tests than Spain.