Portugal’s spending on healthcare below EU average

In 2022, Portugal invested €2,814 per person on healthcare, which is lower than the EU average of €3,533. This amount is just a bit more than half of Germany's spending, the highest in the EU, which reached €5,317 per person.

The information is sourced from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Health at a Glance Europe 2024 report published by the European Commission. It reveals that expenditures between 2019 and 2022 were significantly influenced by the pandemic, with health spending per person in EU nations increasing by an average of 3.6% each year.

In 2022, Portugal placed 17th out of the 27 European Union countries for this particular measure. Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands topped the list, while Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia were at the bottom.

In 2022, Switzerland topped the list in Europe for healthcare spending, allocating €5,630 for each individual. When looking at EU member countries, Germany came next, spending €5,317 per person, which is 50% higher than the average of €3,533 when adjusted for population size across the EU.

Several European countries that are not part of the EU allocate significantly less for health care. For instance, Turkey spends roughly €1,000 per person, while Albania's expenditure is even lower, at under €800.

The OECD report states that in some wealthier countries of Western and Northern Europe, health expenditures can be up to five times greater than in certain lower-spending nations in Central Europe.

In 2022, households in EU countries made direct payments that represented an average of 15% of total health spending. However, in Portugal, this percentage reached 30%, placing it among the highest rates in the region, alongside Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, and Greece.

Since the pandemic began in 2020, governments have directed an extraordinary amount of money toward the healthcare sector to fight COVID-19. In actual figures, the average increase in health expenditures was close to 6% in 2020 and rose to 9.6% in 2021 throughout the EU.

With the pandemic now transitioning to a less critical phase in many nations, new global political and economic conditions have arisen. These changes have led to other pressing issues, like the energy crisis and rising living costs, causing health concerns to take a back seat in government priorities, according to the report.

Consequently, individual health spending is expected to drop significantly to 3.7% throughout the EU in 2022, and early projections for 2023 suggest a further decrease in nearly half of the EU member states, according to the OECD and the European Commission.

In 2022, healthcare accounted for 10.4% of the EU's GDP, with Germany leading the way by allocating 12.6%. France and Austria were close behind, each dedicating over 11% of their GDP to healthcare.

The report mentions that Belgium, Sweden, and Portugal also allocated 10.5% or more of their GDP to healthcare.

Primary healthcare, regarded in the study as the essential foundation of an effective health system, received an average of 13% of the health budgets among EU countries in 2022. This percentage varied significantly, with some countries like Luxembourg and the Netherlands dedicating less than 10%, while others, such as Estonia and Lithuania, allocated nearly 20%.

(Pedro Caetano – revised by Pedro Sousa Carvalho | Lusa.pt)