Portugal in 17th place when it comes to spending per capita
Considering recent soundbites (involving citizens dying in A&E departments waiting to be attended, or waiting hours for INEM emergency response – and in some cases dying in the process), it is perhaps not surprising to learn that the country spends less, per capita, on health than many European countries.
According to the new “Health at a Glance Europe“ report released today by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Commission (EC), Portugal spent €2,814 per person on health in 2022, below the European Union (EU) average of €3,533 and just over half that of Germany, which had the highest expenditure at €5,317.
In terms of this indicator, Portugal was in 17th place in 2022, among the 27 EU countries, in a table led by Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, with Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia at the tail end.
In 2022, with an expenditure of €5,630 per person, Switzerland was the country that invested most in healthcare in Europe, while in relation to the EU member states, healthcare expenditure in Germany (€5,317) was 50% higher than the population-weighted EU average.
In some European countries outside the EU, spending on healthcare was a great deal lower – for example, Turkey, which spent only around €1,000 per capita, while in Albania, the figure was less than €800.
“This means that health spending in the high-income countries of Western and Northern Europe can be five times higher than in some low-spending countries in Central Europe,” the OECD points out.
In 2022, direct payments by households accounted for an average of 15% of all healthcare spending in EU countries, but in Portugal, it was 30% – one of the highest figures, along with Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, and Greece (showing how much Portuguese households have to rely on private health providers/ private insurance policies).
Nonetheless, Lusa refers to the pandemic “beginning in 2020” when governments allocated “unprecedented financial resources to the health sector” to combat COVID-19.
“The average growth in healthcare spending reached almost 6% in real terms in 2020 and accelerated to 9.6% in 2021 across the EU”.
(This sentence belies the fact that the ‘growth in healthcare spending’ was allocated solely to the fight against Covid-19: health investment in a wider sense plummeted: cancer screenings particularly were cutback, leading to a later ‘crisis’ in cases coming forwards at stages more advanced than doctors were used to finding them).
The report does not appear to mention this, however. Lusa simply cites it as saying that “as the pandemic has moved towards the end of the acute phase in many countries, new geopolitical and economic circumstances have emerged, which have meant that other emergencies, such as the energy crisis and the cost of living, have “weakened the position of health within government priorities”.
As a result, spending on healthcare per capita “fell sharply” in 2022 to 3.7% across the EU, and preliminary estimates for 2023 point to a further contraction in around half of EU countries, according to the OECD and the EC.
Source material: LUSA
