Life Expectancy and Health Expenditure

Over the last few weeks I’ve spent a bit of time trying to understand comparative tax levels that were raised on another topic; this led me on to looking at government expenditures on health provision (one of the biggest users of tax income) and this then led on to a more detailed study on its costs and benefits.

When I started looking at health provision I looked for some way to measure its efficiency rather than just measuring its volume (which is much simpler) – in the case of health expenditure, life expectancy was the only realistic measure of efficiency that I could come up with and one where various agencies had existing studies that could be compared with each other. It should be noted that there are many factors (e.g. dietary, genetic, education, smoking etc) involved in life expectancy but in trying to keep this relatively simple I have not attempted to qualify or quantify them.

The data I have used is from 2006 - it may be a couple of years old but there is currently no recent comprehensive data available (that I believe to be reasonably accurate).

I have produced three separate tables for Per Capita Health Expenditure which should be read in conjunction with each other, the first two added together equals the third; they are based on “Purchasing Power Parity” and all are in USD.

The tables are for the 40 countries with the WHO longest “life expectancy at birth” for 2006 (which is very similar to that of the 2009 CIA Factbook); they are:

1. Government Health Expenditures

2. Private Health Expenditures.

3. Total Health Expenditures - i.e. Government + Private, or 1 + 2 above.
Note - this table includes an additional column showing total health expenditure as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product.

• Each table is sorted in the 2006 descending order of “life expectancy at birth” for both sexes - for additional info I’ve added the life expectancies for Males and Females.

• The column “% of USA” enables easy comparison of the cost of each country with that of the USA (where there is a bit of a debate going on at the moment).

• In the column headed “Rated”, the lower the number the more expensive the cost.

I thought about excluding some of the smaller countries but decided that would probably raise more questions than answers – to aid quantification of the impact of those counties I added the 2006 population, for instance it can be seen that Andorra, Monaco & San Marino (all tied 2nd in life expectancy) actually only have a combined population of only 138,000.

Government Health Expenditures

Private Health Expenditures

Government + Private Health Expenditures


Although I have some reservations about the accuracy of data for the smaller and/or less developed countries, I do not believe that any inaccuracies contained therein materially affect the figures.

Our host country Thailand, although failing to make the top 40 in life expectancy, is shown at the bottom of the tables.

Primary data source: http://www.who.int/whosis/en/

See also “The World Factbook” produced by the CIA: https://www.cia.gov/library/publication ... index.html

wish i had a link to verify info, but you are talking about life expectancy, as opposed to how long living and expenditures. right before stopped working, in one of the company meetings, this was discussed during union negotiations of course, about the under funded pension fund. the stats were presented, form the unions and company, and with other companies, on life expectancy, and actually length of time people live after retirement. gov't/usa social security figures were not included, just union workers, as info was readily available. anyway, after retirement, the amount of monthly checks that were distributed before death............18.........that's a depressing number, in my job classification, 11, worst. hence the reason pension funds are under funded to life expectancy. i'm guessing this took into consideration, early deaths before retiring and those that lived to 90 yrs old, with an average, of 18 months received overall. using 65 as a retirement age...........that's depressing

gov't and companies seem to want to raise that retirement age all the time, as my brother has to wait till 68, i think to start collecting gov't retirement, me 66, used to always be 65. for some older folks, 62 was the collection age. many younger have to wait till 70. don't see it happening. raise the age so they don't have to pay. sounds like a gov't/insurance/corporate conspiracy to me.........where's Ronnie at when you need him.

i know many living past 70, and many never made to 50, so 65-67 sounds about right for an average.

It was nice to see the tables although I do find it a tad depressing, it is interesting to note recently, retiring at 70 could be an option as at long last companies are finding that many of their retirees are actually better than new employees, and savings made by employing someone younger ( low pay sacale) arenot cost effective.
No doubt as we are all living longer our children and childrens children will have to wait even longer to retire and provisions for health private and governmental will have to be reassessed every few years in order to deal with the longevity of its members.