“You put in one euro and I’ll put in ten.” That is what the EU Infrastructure funds offer to East European countries. So how come €6 billion, that could be spent on new hospitals and new equipment, plus further billions for healthcare IT are not being taken up?

That is the question European policymakers and industry lobbyists are trying to answer. One said: “We used to think it was the deficit that was the problem, but now people are coming to the conclusion that these countries simply lack civil servants competent enough to submit projects.”

The scale of the short fall in projects is extraordinary. We were told that in the last 18 months Poland has applied for around half the money allocated to it. And that is the highest figure. Hungary has also been reasonably effective, with the Czech Rep and Slovakia also active. But some countries, particularly Romania and Bulgaria have applied for as little as 15%.

The fact that this money is simply not being applied for can only be described as extraordinary. The sad paradox is that it is the countries whose health systems have failed, such as Bulgaria and Romania, who have applied for the least money. Countries with failing hospitals, who can not deploy nearly free money in their reconstruction, can hardly be described as having healthcare systems at all. If nothing else, this shows that the political elite in these countries have given up on universal public healthcare. We are witnessing privatisation by default.