Health Care
During the decade of the 1 970s shares of national product grew in western industrialized countries at 11/2 percentage points, on average, for the decade.
Abstract
XITIE spend about 9% of our gross national product on personal health v care. Is this too much? It is, of course, impossible to say whether we spend too much or too little of our national product on health care. I am not aware of any research that tells us what the optimal level of health spending should be in relation to national product. Two international meetings in the 1970s explored the escalation in the shares of national product health care was receiving in western countries.1 7 And within the past two years the subject has been treated again by an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study on resource allocation in health.7 It is difficult to put together international data which are very recent, but during the mid-1970s proportions of national product spent on medical care were uniformly high in western industrialized countries. For the 24 leading, non-Communist, industrialized developed countries, the average percent of total (public and private) health expenditures to Gross Domestic Product was about 6%; by 1980 the average will be probably 7 to 71/2%. The United States, throughout the decade of the 1970s, exceeded the average of total spending to national product of its industrialized sisters, but still health expenditures in Sweden, Germany, Australia, Holland, and Canada took almost as significant a share of national resources as in America. If one plays around with some of the numbers in these international reports, it does seem that during the decade of the 1 970s shares of national product grew in western industrialized countries at 11/2 percentage points, on average, for the decade. Insofar as I can tell from published accounts, the growth rate for health exceeds that for almost anything else