I suppose you could say that my current inquiries (into the state of European healthcare) went rather deeper than anything managed by Dr Liam Fox or Alan Milburn. I didn't just go and look at hospitals. I became the involuntary English patient.
Too easily done. A dark night in a pretty deserted Catalan village. A trip and a heavy fall, cannoning sideways into a giant flower pot. When I got back to home base, the ribs were shrieking and I was bleeding internally. Kidney damage? Not - even by my battered lights - a good scene.
The ambulance came - from the local town, six miles away - in 15 minutes. On to that town's little all-night clinic, then, at the double, to the hospital in Palamos (population 15,000). Ninety-two minutes after the fall I'd been x-rayed, assessed, put on a drip and given a bed in the emergency ward, blood pressure monitored on the hour. By eight in the morning, I'd had an ultrasound scan of the kidneys.
"Normal" said the scanner lugubriously. "Normal." But the bleeding hadn't stopped. Getting better - on solemn doctor's orders - involved four more days and nights lying immobile in a bed upstairs. Plenty of time to think and observe, as well as ache.
What was different about this place? How was it different from, say, the south London hospital of rather grim repute where my mother-in-law once took her 89-year-old broken hip? Here are a few of the different things - some physical, some social, some organisational.
Physically, there weren't any wards in the old British manner - and certainly not the mixed-sex agglomeration my mother-in-law found so humiliating. Palamos gives you a large room to share (suitably curtained) between two, a phone at your right hand, a light switch and buzzer at your left. The room comes with a loo, shower and basin and coin-in-the-slot TV. In no sense lush; indeed, rather bare. But fresh and clean. The first person in each morning, before it was light, was the cleaner.
Socially, you might as well have been on another planet. There are no defined visiting hours. My wife slept with me the first night upstairs on an aeroplane-type chair by the bed. Standard practice in Spain: all relatives welcome. My roomshare beyond the curtain had an operation at six one evening, was wheeled back from theatre at 9.30 and seemed then to stage a bustle of comings and goings till 25 minutes to midnight. You don't feel - from the noise - as though you're in hospital. It's more like a good party where the drinks have run out. Revitalisation? Si. Recuperation? Maybe.
Organisationally, they believe in clockwork. You could set your watch by the appearance of meals, temperature takers, linen changers (new linen every day at 10.30), bed bathers. Everybody - except one glum night nurse - smiled. I made the average bell response time 51 seconds. No demarcation lines. Nurses or radiographers turn porters in an instant if that's sensible. No queueing. On discharge morning, they fetched me for a second x-ray and scan exactly when they'd said they would. The doctor arrived on cue. I was checked and on my way out in three meticulous hours. Efficiency - even in the middle of a Catalan flu epidemic - lives. As you arrive, they give you a report card to tick on the way out about your treatment.
Now, I've no way of knowing whether Palamos hospital - founded 1761 - is in any way exceptional. The boys in my village bar say it's fine, better than Girona. "Though you should try France. That's perfecto." And, of course, there are surely many better hospitals around than the decrepit, rigidly dour place my mother-in-law encountered a few days before she died.
Even so, Palamos came up trumps. It was cheery, carefully organised and care-filled. I'd have done brilliantly to have found its like in Britain at the first time of asking (and I might have found the Portland). Now for the nitty-gritty.
Five nights, drips, drugs, ambulances, food and two complete sets of tests cost £980 on travel insurance - because I hadn't got an EU form E111 with me. That, stacked against £300 for an annual 45 minutes of Harley Street check-up, is amazing value. It also points to the door where Messrs Fox and Milburn might like to knock.
The way Spain finances its health (at around the European average that Mr Blair would aspire to immediately, if only his defence spending wasn't far above the European average) is calculated to invite a British frown. The state, via taxation, buys you what Ally Campbell would probably call bog standard care. In time of emergency need, nobody worries. (I'd have been treated the same in Palamos whatever scheme or non-scheme operated). But that isn't the whole of the story. Beyond the bog standard, there's also private insurance and super private insurance.
We don't need to worry about the super club. That's just big bucks as usual. But the modest insurance route (a mix and match with state provision) is much more interesting. For one thing, it's relatively cheap. My daughter pays just under £1 a day - a cup of coffee - for coverage which allows her access to a chosen doctor, chosen hospitals to give birth in, and stay for four days, annual dental checks - the lot. For another thing, millions of people - a huge majority - take out the policy. It is the norm, not the exception.
It echoes a mix of means and methods (where the state sometimes finances private hospitals). It sanctions choice and convenience. It separates the good from the slack, because quality follows the funds flow. Being a customer matters. It buys the equipment. It puts extra cash directly into the central system.
Is that what Nye Bevin would hail as his dream made flesh? Perhaps not. Egalitarianism gags at the public/private divide. So, in British terms, does the political necessity of paying something extra for a supposedly "free" service. New Labour has seen this future - and dived for cover. Iain Duncan Smith will probably do likewise for all his Swedish foreplay.
"But why shouldn't people who can afford to pay be asked to pay something?" inquires a Spanish doctor. It is what makes their health service viable - for the price of a grotty package holiday. It can, as a matter of priority, be afforded. It's pitched low because it needs to keep costs down for the many - not set them high for exclusiveness. It trains the extra doctors and nurses Mr Milburn would like to recruit. And all for the price of a cup of coffee.
There's the principle (paradise lost) and the practicality. And the question - as the bleeding man said when he cannoned into an amphora - is what's so wrong, if those who were ill get better?
