The future of health and long-term care spending

Abstract

This paper proposes a new set of public health and long-term care expenditure projections until 2060, following up on the previous set of projections published in 2006. It disentangles health from long-term care expenditure as well as the demographic from the non-demographic drivers, and refines the previous methodology, in particular by better identifying the underlying determinants of health and long-term care spending and by extending the country coverage to include BRIICS countries. A cost-containment and a cost-pressure scenario are provided together with sensitivity analysis. On average across OECD countries, total health and long-term care expenditure is projected to increase by 3.3 and 7.7 percentage points of GDP between 2010 and 2060 in the cost-containment and the cost-pressure scenarios, respectively. For the BRIICS over the same period, it is projected to increase by 2.8 and 7.3 percentage points of GDP in the costcontainment and the cost-pressure scenarios, respectively.