posts: 29190

{
    "id": "wp-29190",
    "slug": "untitled-reusable-block-178",
    "content": {
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                "value": [
                    {
                        "text": "One of the most important inputs to health is health",
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                    },
                    {
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "care",
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                        ],
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                    },
                    {
                        "text": ". Here we study cross-country evidence of the link between aggregate healthcare consumption and production, and health outcomes.",
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                    }
                ],
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                "value": [
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                        "text": "One common way of measuring national healthcare consumption and production is to estimate aggregate expenditure on healthcare (typically expressed as a share of national income).",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    }
                ],
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                "value": [
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                        "text": "This visualization shows the cross-country relationship between life expectancy at birth and healthcare expenditure per capita. ",
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                ],
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                        "text": "The chart shows the level of both measures at two points in time, about a generation apart (1995 and 2014 respectively). The arrows connect these two observations, thereby showing the change over time of both measures for all countries in the world. As it can be seen, countries with higher expenditure on healthcare per person tend to have a higher life expectancy. And looking at the change over time, we see that as countries spend more on health, life expectancy of the population increases.",
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                        "text": "Notice that the relationship in this chart seems to follow a pattern of 'diminishing returns': the increase in life expectancy associated with an increase in healthcare expenditure decreases as expenditure increases. This means the proportional highest gains are achieved in poor countries with low baseline levels of spending. This pattern is similar to that observed ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "/life-expectancy/#life-expectancy-and-gdp",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "between life expectancy and per capita income",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
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                    },
                    {
                        "text": ".",
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                        "text": "The countries are color-coded by world region, as per the inserted legends. Many of the green countries (Sub-Saharan Africa) achieved remarkable progress over the last 2 decades: health spending often increased substantially and life expectancy in many African countries increased by more than 10 years. The most extreme case is Rwanda, where life expectancy has increased from 32 to 64 years since 1995 \u2014 which was one year after the Rwandan genocide. The graph also shows that the African countries that suffered the most under the ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "https://owid.cloud/hiv-aids",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "HIV/AIDS epidemic",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": " \u2014 Lesotho, Eswatini, and South Africa \u2014 experienced a decline of life expectancy from which they have not yet recovered.",
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                    }
                ],
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                    {
                        "text": "The two most populous countries of the world \u2013 India and China \u2013 are emphasized by larger arrows. It is interesting to see that in 1995 China achieved already relatively good health outcomes at comparatively low levels of health spending.",
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                    }
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                    {
                        "text": "The association between health spending and increasing life expectancy also holds for rich countries in Europe, Asia, and North America in the upper right corner of the chart. The US is an outlier that achieves only a comparatively short life expectancy considering the fact that the country has by far the highest health expenditure of any country in the world.",
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            },
            {
                "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-healthcare-expenditure?xScale=log&endpointsOnly=1&time=1995..2014",
                "type": "chart",
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            }
        ],
        "type": "article",
        "title": "How strong is the link between healthcare expenditure and life expectancy?",
        "authors": [
            null
        ],
        "dateline": "December 19, 2019",
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        "featured-image": ""
    },
    "createdAt": "2019-12-19T15:45:25.000Z",
    "published": false,
    "updatedAt": "2020-12-09T15:04:55.000Z",
    "revisionId": null,
    "publishedAt": "2019-12-19T15:45:18.000Z",
    "relatedCharts": [],
    "publicationContext": "listed"
}