Spending on Health

The Irish Government is planning to significantly cut back on Health spending. Graph 1 is the trend of spending as a percentage of GDP in a selected list of countries over recent years. We know that the UK, France and Cuba have relatively good health systems mostly sponsored by the state. So how do other counties compare? For example, the USA has a very high % expenditure on health compared to GDP but approximately 55% of the expenditure is made up from private health expenditure on insurance or direct payments and hence the USA Governemnt has a low % contribution from the total expenditure on health (as does Greece surprisingly in this small small sample of countries - see Graph 2).

It looks like Ireland will be going the way of the US where anyone who can afford it will have private health insurance (all the rest will have to make do). All data sourced from the WHO site.