It is not easy to talk to Berliners about hospital waiting lists - largely because they have no experience of them. With their healthcare needs taken care of by a system that has more of everything - doctors, hospitals, specialists, nurses - than they need, their experience is strikingly different from that in the Republic.
Most remarkable is that when you ask what improvements they would like to see, they're stumped. The system as it is has nearly everything they want.
And yet there is a growing feeling that it can't go on like this. The insurance bodies through which the system is financed - health insurance is compulsory - are reporting losses, and some hospitals are being closed in a bid to reduce costs.
But even a slimmed-down system is likely to be good enough to be the envy of patients and health-service workers in the Republic.
"We don't have these waiting lists," says Lisa Arnold, a nurse at Benjamin Franklin University Hospital. "I have heard about these lists. A friend of mine in Liverpool got a lump under her arm, and it could have been cancer or something, but she was on a list. That doesn't happen here."
In Berlin or any big German city, her friend would have had an embarrassment of specialists to choose from. There, specialists are not gods in hospitals. Instead, they run independent businesses and face lots of competition.
Elizabeth Braun is a kidney and dialysis specialist who runs a practice with a partner. They employ 18 nurses and their patients come to them three times a week for dialysis. All equipment is bought by the business, with commercial loans repaid from fees received from the health insurers for treating patients.
But Braun's business is only one of 24 specialising in dialysis in Berlin. "Even if you go on holidays within Germany, you'll find a dialysis unit there where you can continue your treatment," she says. And it's not just dialysis that's available in abundance. "It's the same for cardiac illnesses and for stomach or similar illnesses," she says.
"We have far too many specialists, particularly in big cities," says Dr Wolfgang Herm, a general practitioner. "We have 55 per cent specialists and 45 per cent GPs in Berlin."
He cites a patient standing at a bus stop with back pain that will go away in a while if he does some exercises. The patient spots the office of an orthopaedic specialist and decides to go in - after all, it's covered by the insurance. Immediately, a new expense has been created for the healthcare system. The specialist, in Herm's view, has equipment and staff that must be used and paid for, and the patient will end up satisfied but having undergone a course of treatment he didn't really need.
The patient will also feel pleased, of course, at having "got something back" for the 5.5 to 7 per cent of his salary that went on compulsory health insurance (an equal amount is paid by the employer).
"I need to get as much as possible back, because I pay too much" is a complaint Herm hears constantly. In recent years, patients have had to begin to make a small contribution towards the cost of prescribed drugs, and they "complain enormously, because they don't know what the drugs cost."
That Germans have no idea of the cost of the health services they receive is an idea that comes up frequently. "People here think they pay a lot," says Arnold. "If you have never been to hospital or seen a doctor, naturally it seems a lot, but if you saw how much it costs for one bed - about DM600 about £240 a night - you would see what you were paying for."
Patients take almost for granted their ease of access to the health system. There are plenty of hospitals, plenty of beds, plenty of doctors and plenty of nurses. Indeed, according to Sybille Golkowski of the Berlin Medical Council, between 1,000 and 1,500 of Berlin's 24,000 doctors are unemployed.
With insurance bodies and the government concerned about the future viability of the system, though, change is on the way.
The consensus of those we spoke to was that health insurance will increasingly be limited to covering essential services, with anything else having to be paid for separately, perhaps through additional, private insurance.
What doctors do not want is to have to cut costs by being more parsimonious with patients. "The government would like a situation where it sits back and says, well, you doctors keep the cost down and then we're all happy," says Golkowski. "But we say, look, we can't maintain quality if we have to think all the time of the economic factors. They are just not compatible. You can't constantly think of cost and reach the quality you desire as a doctor."
Yet with Germans grumbling about the cost of health insurance, it looks as though significant increases in premiums are not a viable option as the health services seek to cut costs. As it is, there is a certain amount of shopping around every September, with premiums offered by various insurers ranging from 11 per cent to 14 per cent of gross pay. Premiums at that level leave little scope for increases.
What's left is to reduce the range of items covered by insurance; psychotherapy is an example of a treatment that might no longer be covered, according to one doctor. That, in turn, might limit the number of health professionals and services available to a public that enjoys a first-class health service.
But even then, compared with anything the Republic is likely to have, their health service will still be in the de luxe range.