Medical-care expenditure: a cross-national survey

Abstract

The circumstance behind the quantity of resources a country allocates to its medical care system has been a consistent topic of debate, due to its presumed downstream effects on well-being. This research focuses on the correlation between a country’s medical care expenses and its income. Statistical analyses of medical care expenditure versus per capita GDP data taken from 13 developed countries revealed a strong positive correlation. This suggests that greater national income directly translates to higher medical care expenditure. Furthermore, additional analyses suggest that this positive correlation is not simply due to higher medical care salaries in wealthier nations. Extrapolating from these results, it can be inferred that the marginal utility of medical expenditures in wealthier nations might not necessarily lead to relevant physiological health improvements. Rather, wealthier countries may opt to allocate greater resources towards medical care for increased subjective benefits that are not directly quantifiable in measures such as mortality or morbidity rates. – AI-generated abstract.