UK/EU: How does UK health spending compare across Europe over the past decade?, 2022, Rebolledo & Charlesworth

The Health Foundation

How does UK health spending compare across Europe over the past decade?

Icaro Rebolledo & Anita Charlesworth

Key points

This analysis examines how health care spending in the UK compares with EU countries in the decade preceding the pandemic. Taking a longer term view enables us to see how trends in spending may have impacted health care resilience today.

Average day-to-day health spending in the UK between 2010 and 2019 was £3,005 per person – 18% below the EU14 average of £3,655.

If UK spending per person had matched the EU14 average, then the UK would have spent an average of £227bn a year on health between 2010 and 2019 – £40bn higher than actual average annual spending during this period (£187bn).

Matching spending per head to France or Germany would have led to an additional £40bn and £73bn (21% to 39% increase respectively) of total health spending each year in the UK.

Over the past decade, the UK had a lower level of capital investment in health care compared with the EU14 countries for which data are available. Between 2010 and 2019, average health capital investment in the UK was £5.8bn a year.

If the UK had matched other EU14 countries’ average investment in health capital (as a share of GDP), the UK would have invested £33bn more between 2010 and 2019 (around 55% higher than actual investment during that period).

Introduction

Health and care services in the UK are facing unprecedented challenges, including chronic staffing shortages and a growing backlog of unmet health care need. These problems have been exacerbated by the pandemic and are also affecting other countries. But what a country spends on health is crucial for the resilience of its health care provision and preparedness for future surges in demand (expected and unexpected).

In 2020, the latest year of available data for UK health spending, there was a big increase (14%) in spending in response to the pandemic. This has resulted in renewed focus on how the UK compares in terms of health spending. The reality, however, is that 2020 was a significant outlier for most health systems even though spending in the UK was higher than most other countries. Taking a longer term view allows us to see how trends in spending may have impacted health care resilience today.

In this analysis we look at how health care spending compares for the decade preceding the pandemic. We explore comparisons for spending on day-to-day running costs and the capital investment spending that funds buildings, equipment and technology. To aggregate EU14 figures into averages, we use the median to compare against to account for outliers. We primarily focus on health spending per head of population (unadjusted for inflation) between 2010 and 2019. We measure this in £s adjusted for differences between countries’ ‘buying power’ using purchasing power parities (£PPP). We convert the $PPPs of the OECD to £PPP using an exchange rate of £0.78 to US$1, which was the average exchange rate in 2019 (source: OECD).

Full article: https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-...ng-compare-across-europe-over-the-past-decade

 

Long article, comparing spending between UK and 14 EU comparator countries. Understanding spending per capita can be important when judging how different systems/Countries deliver services for PwME and what capacity there is is for improvement. Spending isn't everything - efficiency also has a role but is a contentious area, also not dealt with in this paper but health and care burdens vary between countries, those with older and/or more sick populations need to spend more proportionately to achieve comparable outcomes.

 

Presumably consumer spend on “wellness” products and services is another confounding variable which may or not be rolled up into country-level totals.

Still, 18% is a large enough disparity to tell a pretty clear story.