Private spending’s slow post-pandemic recovery
Both private pay, and especially out-of-pocket payments, decreased during the pandemic. OECD figures for out-of-pocket payments in 2021, and the all private spending figures in 2022 show these are recovering.
The graph below shows the percentage of healthcare spending coming from out-of-pocket from 2016-2021. Of the countries shown, 20.2% health expenditure came from out-of-pocket payments on average in 2019. This dropped to 18.3% in 2020, with only Romania and Slovenia seeing an increase (by 0.25 and 0.81 percentage points respectively).
In 2021, the average dropped again to around 18.1%, although some markets, including three major ones in France, Italy, and Spain, all saw an uptick.
The OECD figures for total private spend seem to suggest this is recovering – but slowly. In 2019, 24.2% of all healthcare spending was private on average in the markets shown. This dropped to roughly 22.3% by 2021 and bounced back to around 22.7% in 2022.
This could suggest the growth in private markets is largely due to revenue rather than patient volume increases. However, a handful of markets are exceeding their pre-pandemic private spend percentages (Turkey, Spain, Norway, and Greece).
Two of the EU5 markets are growing faster than the average with the UK’s private pay percentage up 1.5 percentage points between 2021 and 2022 and Spain up 1.4 percentage points in the same time period. Italy has dropped 0.4 percentage points, Germany is down 1 percentage point and France is on exactly the same percentage.
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