Next week policy makers, researchers, and clinicians from across Europe will meet at the annual European Health Forum in Bad Gastein, Austria. Debate will focus on the effect of the financial crisis on Europe’s health systems and strategies to rein in costs, improve efficiency, and meet rising demand for services.

Let’s hope the discussions prove more productive than recent ones in the US. There, a summer of well orchestrated attacks on Barack Obama’s proposed health reforms and scare stories about Britain’s “dreaded NHS” all but drowned rational dialogue.1 This is regrettable, not least because policy experts on both sides of the Atlantic agree that the US could learn useful lessons not only from the NHS but from several of Europe’s cheaper, equally effective, and more equitable health systems.

One organisation committed to furthering such cross country learning and using it to promote evidence based policy making is the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, a major contributor to the agenda and background information for the Gastein meeting.