Cyclical vs structural effects on health care expenditure trends in OECD countries

Health care expenditure per person, after accounting for changes in overall price levels, began to slow in many OECD countries in the early-to-mid 2000s, well before the economic and fiscal crisis. Using available estimates from the OECD’s System of Health Accounts (SHA) database, we explore common trends in health care expenditure since 1996 in a set of 22 OECD countries. We assess the extent to which the trends observed are the results of cyclical economic influences, and the respective contributions of changes in relative prices, health care volumes and coverage to the slowdown in health care expenditure growth. Our analysis suggests that cyclical factors may account for a little less than one half of the estimated slowdown in health care spending since the crisis, suggesting that structural changes have contributed to the trends. Before the crisis the slowdown in health care expenditure growth was accounted for by health care prices growing less than general prices and a reduction in care volumes, whereas the latter accounts for most of the steeper deceleration after the crisis. Although both privately and publically financed health care expenditure grew at a reduced pace during the study period, the sharp post-crisis deceleration happened mostly in the public component. When examined by function, the slowdown in publicly-financed expenditure has been largest in curative and rehabilitative care (particularly after the crisis) and in medical goods (especially pharmaceuticals), whereas the deceleration in the privately financed component is largely in medical goods (including pharmaceuticals). We conclude that structural changes in publicly financed health care have constrained the growth of care volumes (especially) and prices leading to a marked reduction in health care expenditure growth rates, beyond what could be expected based on cyclical economic fluctuations. We examine a range of government policies enacted in a selection of OECD countries that likely contributed to the structural changes observed in our analysis.