After decades of growth driven by technological development, in the G7 countries health spending slowed down just on the eve of Covid, in the period 2011-2019, only to then explode to face the pandemic. That's what we read in an analysis by the Observatory on Italian public accounts.
According to the analysis, since the seventies the ratio between health expenditure and GDP has grown in all the countries of the group (USA, Canada, Japan, Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy), with the simple average rising from 5,5% in 1971 to 11,5, 2019% of XNUMX.
The growth rate remained almost stable until 2007But then something changed. As Edoardo Bella, author of the analysis, explains during the global crisis of 2008-2009 the curve soared as health spending was kept at high levels despite the collapse of economies.
Thus we arrive at the decade that most interests us, that one between 2010 and 2019, where the ratio of health expenditure to GDP is raised only modestly. Two factors contributed to this slowdown: technological changes and “the progressive reduction in the length of hospitalizations in all advanced countries, which has made it possible to reduce costs”, continues the analysis.
However, the main cause of the slowdown is of an accounting nature, i.e. the surge in the ratio during the post-Lehman Brothers financial crisis, when the average ratio went from 9,9% in 2007 to 11,1% in 2009, recording the fastest two-year increase in the last fifty years.
"After such a leap - writes Bella - it seems understandable that, in the following years, the growth of health expenditure was kept at a level only slightly higher than that of GDP, with a modest increase in the ratio between the two".
Yet, at the same time, "the low rates of growth in spending in the period 2010-19, compared with the past, can be seen as a correction compared to the fewer resources available in terms of GDP”, given that “the 2008-09 crisis has never been completely reabsorbed, having led to a permanent reduction in the level of GDP, compared to the pre-crisis trend”.
With Covid, then, another boom arrived: in Italy, France, Germany and the United Kingdom the ratio shot up from 8,4% in 2019 to 9,5% in 2020. A variation due not only to the increase in health expenditure in absolute terms (+7,5% on average), but also to the fall in GDP (-5,7%).
