The UK has close to the lowest cost healthcare in the world.
Assuming this refers to spending on healthcare as a percentage of GDP, the UK spends more than the average of the 35 OECD countries, but less than most of the G7 countries. These kinds of comparisons will differ depending on what you classify as ‘healthcare’.
“As a nation, we have to pay more for our NHS. It is the lowest cost healthcare almost in the world, I think, for what we are getting.”
Susie Boniface, 26 January 2017
This could be a claim about the NHS being efficient or being underfunded, compared to other countries.
The UK health system was ranked first out of 11 developed countries for efficiency in 2013, in a widely cited study by the Commonwealth Fund.
But Ms Boniface told us that she might have been thinking of figures from the NHS Confederation on spending on healthcare as a percentage of GDP.
The Confederation, which represents organisations within the NHS such as hospital trusts, does point to the UK being below the USA, Germany, France, Netherlands, Denmark and Canada, on this measure.
A different comparison from the Office for National Statistics puts the UK sixth in the G7 group of countries, or fifth out of seven excluding private spending.
The NHS Confederation’s figures come from the OECD, a bigger club of 35 relatively wealthy nations. Looking across all 35, the UK actually spends more than the average on health.
However, the definition of health spending used for this comparison includes private healthcare and social care. Go back a few years to when the definition was different, and the UK came out below average.
As we’ve said before, these comparisons are tricky.
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