Chinese spend more cash on healthcare than France spends overall
This week the OECD has released new data on healthcare expenditures for 2019 across several major economies. It shows some interesting nuggets, like how the Chinese spend more out-of-pocket than the entirety of France spends on healthcare and that Hungary has one of the lowest healthcare spendings in the world.
The new figures break down the overall expenditures by financing scheme, into government spending, compulsory insurance spending, voluntary insurance spending and out-of-pocket spending.
Unsurprisingly, the largest economies have the largest total nominal healthcare expenditures: excluding the US, China comes in first, followed by Japan, Germany, France and the UK.
More interesting is how the financing scheme mix differs so drastically between countries.
The UK, famed for its National Health Service, has the largest public healthcare spend in the world, comprising about 79% of the total UK health expenditure. Compare this to France, which, despite having a similar level of development and typically thought to be far more socialist than the UK, has a government expenditure of merely 6% of the total health spend.
And China, a nominally communist country, has by far the largest out-of-pocket expenditure in the world, making up around 36% of the total spend, whilst government spending accounts for just 18%.
The full OECD report can be found here.
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