Funding of Health Services
"NZ spends noticeably less per person on health than many of the other countries that we like to compare ourselves with, such as Germany, Austria, and Sweden, and as a consequence their health services are more comprehensive and impose less charges on patients. One of the reasons for this gap is that we also collect less tax than those countries. With Labour unwilling to grow tax revenue and the National Party and ACT committed to tax cuts, how will the parties ensure that we can fund the public health services we know we need in the future?”
Answer
Facts to support the question:
Selected OECD Countries' total health spending per capita in PPP (purchasing power parity) international dollars (a hypothetical unit of currency that has the same purchasing power parity that the US dollar had in the US at a given point in time).
Not inflation-adjusted
Ranking |
Country |
2020 PPP international dollars |
Ranking |
2022 PPP international dollars |
3 |
Germany |
6,939 |
3 |
8,011 (provisional) |
6 |
Austria |
5,883 |
6 |
7,275 (p) |
8 |
Sweden |
5,757 |
10 |
6,438 (p) |
11 |
Australia |
5,627 |
8 |
6,596 (estimate) |
15 |
United Kingdom |
5,019 |
17 |
5,493 (p) |
19 |
New Zealand |
4,469 |
14 |
6,061 (e) |
Source: https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm
Country |
Tax % of GDP 2022 |
New Zealand |
33.78 |
OECD average |
34.11 |
Austria |
42.83 |
Germany |
39.51 |
Sweden |
42.58 |
Source: OECD Data https://data.oecd.org)
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