We are well aware, see e.g. here, that the NHS employs about 1.4 million people, including "146,075 doctors, 369,868 qualified nursing staff and 37,314 managers".
It has a budget of "£105.254bn in 2012/13".
Just for fun, we can multiply up the doctors by £100,000 a year each (£15 billion), the nurses and managers by £40,000 a year each (£16 billion) and the other 850,000 by £20,000 a year each (£17 billion) and tot that up to £48 billion, half the NHS budget.
We are also well aware, from personal experience as patients, that you get treated a lot better/quicker in European countries. This is partly because of the best-of-both worlds taxpayer-funded (with small personal additional charges), patient-driven, competing-providers model.
But it's the money as well. I've tried and failed to find out how much the Germans spend on healthcare, but we can use total employment figures as a good proxy for total spending, which I found here.
See if you can guess the total before you follow the link!
If your German's a bit rusty, click and highlight below to reveal the official total:
Four (4) million! Jeez!!
NB, I've adjusted that figure down to exclude people working in health-related sectors, i.e. pharmaceuticals and dispensing chemists, who would not show up in NHS figures either. You could knock off another quarter to take account of Germany's larger population.
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