Analytics, Estonia, EU – Baltic States, Health, Markets and Companies, Medicine

Estonia spends 6.3% of its GDP on health care costs while the average among OECD member states is 9.5%, is revealed by the organisation’s 2012 health care sector overview. Only Mexico and Turkey spent proportionately less than Estonia on the health care system.

According to the organisation, spending on health care increases together with the increase in wealth and the countries with higher GDP also have greater health care spending. In the United States, 17.6% of GDP was spent on health care, in the Netherlands it was 12% and in France 11.6%. Estonia’s health care spending is nearly half that. Estonia’s GDP is also that much smaller from the point of view of purchasing power parity. In Estonia the indicator was 1,294 dollars per year per person while the OECD average in 2012 was 3,268 dollars.

In the year-on-year comparison, Estonia’s health care spending grew by an average of 6.9% between 2000 and 2009. In 2010, on the other hand, the decline was 7.3%. Health care spending also fell in several other OECD member states in 2010.