We’re going to hear a lot about the NHS this week: mostly tributes and praise – and even a few prayers – all in recognition of its 75th anniversary on Wednesday. The loudest criticism you’re likely to hear will be about underfunding – which is not the fault of NHS officials, really, but rather the fault of politicians who set the health service’s budget. The NHS is only falling short on patient outcomes, the logic goes, because it’s being denied resources in the first place.
Is it really? New data published by the OECD this afternoon pops some of those birthday balloons. It reveals that the NHS actually remains one of the best-funded healthcare systems in the world. The numbers for 2022 are in, and as The Spectator’s data hub shows, the UK ranks sixth on the list for health expenditure as a percentage of GDP.
The UK ties with the Swiss healthcare system – often held up as a gold standard for both funding and outcomes – by spending 11.3 per cent of GDP on healthcare. Countries across the world, known for getting far better outcomes than the NHS – including Denmark, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, the list goes on – are spending less.
This much money being funnelled into the NHS is nothing new. In 2021, the NHS was thought to be the fifth-best funded system, according to the OECD. But the revised figures today bump it up to third place.
Additional Covid spending (and recovery money) has seen the NHS’s place on these charts jump in recent years. Unsurprisingly, spending as a percentage of GDP was higher for the majority of countries in 2021 than it was last year, as the pandemic was still at its peak. But back in 2019 the UK was already spending well above the average OECD on healthcare: 10 per cent of GDP, compared to the average of 8.4 per cent.
Make no mistake: in the UK, this money is being funnelled into the NHS. There is ‘no evidence of widespread privatisation of NHS services,’ according to the King's Fund’s report, published just a few months ago. The amount of money being spent on private provision not only remains in the single-digits: it remains at similar levels in 2019-20 as it did in 2012.
So with internationally high levels of funding going into the health service, what explains its inability to deliver outcomes its neighbours manage to achieve? What more is needed, exactly, to make the patient experience in the UK look more like the plethora of countries that are spending less yet getting better results? These are just a couple of the many questions that should perhaps be asked this week, amidst the celebrations for our NHS.
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