The cycle of life can be reduced to a cut-and-dried equation: on any given day in Australia, 800 babies are born, while 400 people die. 
But a statistic can only reveal so much. In Keeping Australia Alive, we witness those bookends as well as many of the events that happen in between in Australia's sprawling health system.
Based on a similar British format, it's built around a simple but effective premise.
It's a snapshot of a single day,   October 28, 2015 - listen carefully to the background noise and you'll hear a radio report about father-and-son fugitives Gino and Mark Stocco - filmed inside hospitals, clinics, homes and ambulances the length and breadth of the nation, from our crowded east-coast cities to the remote stretches of the Top End.
Filmed with 100 cameras and a generous seven hours of screen time, what it reveals is something other than the tabloid panic of emergency wards crammed with critically ill patients on gurneys and a failing health system that is about to collapse and bankrupt the economy.
Rather, Keeping Australia Alive homes in on the everyday heroes who keep the system ticking over - the overworked GPs, impossibly calm paramedics, nurses and surgeons devoted to healing patients - as well as the stoic and occasionally hostile patients on the receiving end of treatment.
An extended herogram, the first two episodes may leave critics of healthcare policy and practice wishing for a more critical examination. That, perhaps, will come in later episodes.
But in documenting our treatment of the chronically ill, cancer sufferers, couples with fertility problems or even substance abusers who could easily be blamed for the predicament in which they find themselves, it says much about our reliance on medical science, the quality of life it can engender and the compassion owed and given to the disenfranchised.
There is certainly a lot of thought given here to the plight of Indigenous Australians struggling with illnesses such as diabetes and the challenges of treatment in remote places.
Anti-Obamacare fearmongers who liken universal healthcare to spiking tap water with cyanide should be forced to watch this.
Unobtrusively filmed - even a kidney transplant operation in episode two, while not recommended for the squeamish, is surprisingly devoid of the graphic horror of medical dramas - and quietly observed, the show also dispenses some cautionary statistics, such as an estimated 1.2 million people looking after someone with dementia and the soaring rates of diabetes, particularly among Indigenous Australians.
Keeping Australia Alive manages to weave those myriad events and what would otherwise be an overload of information into a series of cohesive chapters, each a road map of a specific facet of the health system.
Reduced to a single line - "the story of the health system in one day" - it could seem glib, but its seamless blend of everyday people dealing with extraordinary events, of grey institutions performing what would have been considered miracles only a few decades ago, make it anything but.
Were it to inspire a generation to become healthcare workers rather than healthcare recipients would be entirely reasonable.