Analysis on the Level of National Health Expenditure and Associated Factors in the OECD Countries

This study tried to find out the level of national health expenditure and associated factors in the OECD countries and then to derive lessons for Korea`s health financing based on the cross-national comparison. As a result, Korea`s health expenditure in 2010(7.1% of GDP) accounted for 74.7 percent of the OECD average and ranked as countries to spend less on health. At the same time, the socio-economic indicators such as GDP per capita, elderly population ratio and the total tax revenue to GDP also remained between 72 ~ 82 percent of the OECD average. The public share of health financing(58.2%) was relatively lower than those of other countries. However the health expenditure and the public share have grown 1.9 ~ 2.4 times higher than the OECD average over the past decade. According to the quantitative analysis, countries with relatively high income and elderly population turned out to have high health expenditure. Whereas, an inverse relationship was found between the total health expenditure and the public funding. It was estimated that the value of national health expenditure to GDP decreases 0.083 when the rate of public funding increases 1 percent point. Further, the share of public funding was affected positively by the total tax burden. Based on these findings, this study suggests that the sustainable spending on health and alleviating households` direct burden could be ensured by enhancing the share of public funding along with adjusting the tax burden of the people.