Healthcare Financing Models and the Expenditure Growth
Healthcare Financing Models and the Expenditure Growth

Author(s): Nikolay Atanasov, Dimitar Semkov
Subject(s): Social Sciences
Published by: Udruženje ekonomista i menadžera Balkana
Keywords: Healthcare financing models; Public health expenditure; Social health insurance; Government budget
Summary/Abstract: The present study includes the countries of the European Union, aiming to test the hypothesis that the funding models can be related to the size and growth of health expenditure, as a phenomenon from the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. The criterion for grouping the national health systems is the dominant public source of financing from the two with the largest weight in the aggregate expenditure – health insurers’ payments and payments on account of the state budget. Data from the health accounts of the countries of the EU for a period of the last 10 years are used. The observed indicator is the weight of total health expenditure of the current GDP, which allows international comparisons to be made. The methods of analysis used include descriptive statistics, verification of hypotheses for the type of empirical distributions, equality of means and variances, and graphical presentation of the detected dependencies. The results show that there is a significant variation in health expenditure between the individual countries in the EU. Within the formed two groups of countries - one with a dominant government budget and the other with a dominant health insurance financing, no statistically significant difference in the size of the health expenditure can be found. Such a dependence is found when grouping using other indicators related to geographical location and living standards.

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