This past summer, National Public Radio did a series on health care systems in other nations to try to identify their strengths and weaknesses. This link lets you choose to listen about systems from several countries in western Europe:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=91971170
One quality that is hard to quantify between systems is a question about values. If people in an area tend to generally adhere to better health prevention practices (their tradition includes more exercise, or families are smaller, or they don't smoke, eating less toxic foods, etc.) that alone would represent major cost savings for any system. Some cultures put higher values on those things than others do. European nations have particularly high standards for some food production and won't even let certain foods from the US be imported. All of those can make some difference in how well people and a health care system do function in terms of dollars/euros.
AlaskaAngel