Health and care spending and its value, past, present and future

In times of relatively low public spending in the UK since 2009-2010, health spending has been protected above all else. At the same time budgets for education, housing and public safety have fallen. This is in part due to the presence of growing demand for healthcare: while the population has increased by around one-third since 1950, healthcare spending as a share on national income has more than doubled. Continuing increases in quantity and complexity of the use of the health service as well as the unit costs indicate that these pressures will not be alleviated any time soon. However, there are clear benefits to investing in health; research finds that a 10% increase in health spending was associated with a gain of 3.5 months of life expectancy across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development from 1995 to 2015. In this paper, we discuss the potential value of additional -spending.