Health Spending In OECD Countries: Obtaining Value Per Dollar (original) (raw)

The Us and High Health Care Spendings

2019

Attaining state of good health and accessing to decent health care are desirable for human beings. The access to health care has been enshrined in several human rights declarations, notably the Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The Article recognises the right to health and role of governments to create and ensure universal coverage to healthcare. An indication of a good standard of health is measured through having equal care access at an affordable price. In reality, the health statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD Health Statistics, 2018) indicated that the health expenditures in many developed countries are relatively high in comparison with their Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This paper starts out by attempting to find an explanation as to why the U.S. health care spending is high relative to its OECD counterparts. The review on existing literatures found that all OECD members have rising healthcare and the United States is indeed the highest of all.

The Us and High Health Care Spendings: A Comparative Case With OECD on the Three Prominent Factors

2019

ABSTRACT: Attaining state of good health and accessing to decent health care are desirable for human beings. The access to health care has been enshrined in several human rights declarations, notably the Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The Article recognises the right to health and role of governments to create and ensure universal coverage to healthcare. An indication of a good standard of health is measured through having equal care access at an affordable price. In reality, the health statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD Health Statistics, 2018) indicated that the health expenditures in many developed countries are relatively high in comparison with their Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This paper starts out by attempting to find an explanation as to why the U.S. health care spending is high relative to its OECD counterparts. The review on existing literatures found that all OECD members ha...

U.S. Health Care Spending In An International Context

Health Affairs, 2004

Using the most recent data on health spending published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), we explore reasons why U.S. health spending towers over that of other countries with much older populations. Prominent among the reasons are higher U.S. per capita gross domestic product (GDP) as well as a highly complex and fragmented payment system that weakens the demand side of the health sector and entails high administrative costs. We examine the economic burden that health spending places on the U.S. economy. We comment on attempts by U.S. policymakers to increase the prices foreign health systems pay for U.S. prescription drugs.

The Growth of Health Spending in the USA: 1776 to 2026

SSRN Electronic Journal

This review utilizes a number of historical and contemporary sources to trace the growth of national health expenditures in the United States from 1776 to 2026, supporting four empirical generalizations: 1) Expenditures follow a typical S-shaped exponential growth curve; a long slow rise followed by a period of rapid increase that eventually moderates and stabilizes. 2) There are lags between macroeconomic fluctuations and corresponding changes in health expenditure. Examination of annual data can estimate business cycle lags on the order of 3 to 6 years with confidence. There may also be low-frequency lags over multiple decades that cannot yet be clearly delineated with the available data. 3) The health share of GDP remained relative stable from 1930-1955, rising only slightly despite major advances in technology, organization and financing. 4) Peak rates of growth occurred during the decade 1960-1970 as the modern national health system took shape. This surge in spending was fostered by large public investments in workforce training, buildings, equipment and research that began prior to the implementation of Medicare and Medicaid. 5) Growth was significantly more rapid from 1975-1995 than from 1995-2015 for reasons that are not fully clear. Modern medical care in 2015 is still recognizably close in form to the 1970 version, much more so than medical practice in 1970 was to that in 1925 or even in 1945. Highly organized and regulated, with academic medical centers at the core, there is "almost" universal insurance coverage for more than 80% of the population that subsidizes a safety net for the remainder. This patchwork of public and private insurance has cracked and frayed as the health share of GDP expanded toward 20% of GDP making the current system appear unsustainable and portending major revisions within the next twenty years. Issues regarding measurement of national health expenditures, market definition, demographic effects, temporal dynamics, and spending decomposition are discussed, with appendices providing more detail on methods and data sources.

The US Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Health Care Spending Chasm

The Health Care Manager, 2012

Comparisons of health care spending between the United States and the rest of the world are frequently made. This article examines macrolevel secondary data comparing health care spending in the United States and other OECD countries, but this comparison does not necessarily present a complete picture. This article puts the US OECD health care spending gap into better context by examining the implications of population differences, quality-of-life spending, obesity trends, and defensive medicine and their contribution to US health care costs.

International health care expenditure trends: 1987

Health Affairs, 1989

Health spending in the United States continues to increase faster than in other major industrialized countries. Between 1986 and 1987, U.S. per capita health expenditures increased by 8.7 percent, compared to a purchasing power parity (PPP) adjusted average rate of increase of 5.6 percent in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. In 1987, U.S. per capita spending on health was 2,051,doublethe2,051, double the 2,051,doublethe1,033 average for the other six countries. While the share of gross domestic product (GDP) devoted to health increased on average by 0.05 to 7.5 percent in the other six countries, the U.S. share increased by 0.3 to 11.2 percent. In other words, U.S. health spending, the largest in the world in both absolute and relative terms, continues to increase more rapidly than spending in other countries, and the gap continues to widen. This DataWatch updates trends in health spending, prices, and utilization in the twenty-four Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. First, we discuss the shares of health expenditures in GDP. Second, we describe the public shares of total health expenditures. Third, we present 1987 per capita health expenditures and analyze the relationship between health expenditures and GDP. Last, we compare U.S. trends in nominal and real expenditure growth and excess health care inflation to trends in other countries. The Share Of Health In GDP Exhibit 1 contains health-to-GDP ratios for the twenty-four OECD countries for 1960-1987. Because of individual countries' revisions in their health expenditure series, the historical figures for Finland,