Global Health Spend
There is a great deal of wildly divergent and sometimes seemingly fabricated information on the size of the US and global healthcare market. For 2014, here are the numbers that I will be using, with my sources, and assumptions and notes.1
2012 Annual Healthcare Spend |
US Dollars Trillion |
Percentage of GDP |
Global |
7.1 |
10.1% |
US |
2.9 |
17.9% |
US percentage of global health spend |
41% |
US percentage of global population |
5% |
Sources
- http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD/countries?display=default: This source gives the global GDP in US dollars for 2012 data.2
- http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.PUBL: This table gives 2011 percentages of GDP that are health spend. Health spend is defined in the table as: “Total health expenditure is the sum of public and private health expenditure. It covers the provision of health services (preventive and curative), family planning activities, nutrition activities, and emergency aid designated for health but does not include provision of water and sanitation.”
- http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL: This table gives population statistics for 2012.
Assumptions
- The changes in percentage of GDP spent on healthcare per nation are trivial from 2011 to 2012
- The changes in GDP between 2011 and 2012 are sufficiently significant to merit the combining of percentages from table 1 with the hard numbers from tables 2 and 3 for these two years.
Notes:
1. These numbers fall into line with the various sources I have reviewed over the past three months.
2. Certain nations are missing from the data sheet. However, I did sum up all the records myself. My assumption is that the World Bank either smoothed these numbers, or the missing numbers are accounted for elsewhere.