Abstract
There are different ways to measure how much Canada spends on health care and the quality of these measurements may vary. This paper examines Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data for 3 common standards of measure: health expenditures as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP), nominal spending per capita (US dollars) and spending per capita in purchasing power parities (PPP) equivalents. In 1994, the most recent year for which there were firm data. Canada spent 9.9% of its GDP on health care (rank 3 of 29), and $1999 PPPs per capita (rank 3). However, actual spending was only US$1824 per capita (rank 14). In the same year Japan spent 7% of GDP on health care (rank 22), $1478 in PPPs per capita (rank 16), but actually spent US$2614 per capita (rank 3). Although each measure is suitable for some policy purposes, Canadian spending remains modest by international standards.
Full Text
The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (124.1 KB).
Selected References
These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.
- Fuchs V. R., Hahn J. S. How does Canada do it? A comparison of expenditures for physicians' services in the United States and Canada. N Engl J Med. 1990 Sep 27;323(13):884–890. doi: 10.1056/NEJM199009273231306. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Redelmeier D. A., Fuchs V. R. Hospital expenditures in the United States and Canada. N Engl J Med. 1993 Mar 18;328(11):772–778. doi: 10.1056/NEJM199303183281107. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]