Public Spending on Health and Long-term Care

Abstract

This paper proposes a new set of public health and long-term care expenditure projections till 2060, following up on the previous set of projections published in 2006. It disentangles health from longterm care expenditure as well as the demographic from the non-demographic drivers, and refines the previous methodology, in particular by better identifying the underlying determinants of health and long-term care spending and by extending the country coverage to include BRIICS countries. A costcontainment and a cost-pressure scenario are provided together with sensitivity analysis. On average across OECD countries, total health and long-term care expenditure is projected to increase by 3.3 and 7.7 percentage points of GDP between 2010 and 2060 in the cost-containment and the cost-pressure scenarios respectively. For the BRIICS over the same period, it is projected to increase by 2.8 and 7.3 percentage points of GDP in the cost-containment and the cost-pressure scenarios respectively.