Healthcare Financing Models and the Expenditure Growth

Nikolay Atanasov – Medical University Plovdiv, Department of Health Management and Health Economics, 15A, blvd. Vasil Aprilov, Plovdiv, 4000, Bulgaria

Dimitar Semkov – Medical University Plovdiv, Department of Health Management and Health Economics, 15A, blvd. Vasil Aprilov, Plovdiv, 4000, Bulgaria

Abstract: The present study includes the countries of the European Un­ion, aiming to test the hypothesis that the funding models can be related to the size and growth of health expenditure, as a phenomenon from the sec­ond half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. The criterion for grouping the national health systems is the dominant public source of fi­nancing from the two with the largest weight in the aggregate expenditure – health insurers’ payments and payments on account of the state budget. Data from the health accounts of the countries of the EU for a period of the last 10 years are used. The observed indicator is the weight of total health ex­penditure of the current GDP, which allows international comparisons to be made. The methods of analysis used include descriptive statistics, verifica­tion of hypotheses for the type of empirical distributions, equality of means and variances, and graphical presentation of the detected dependencies. The results show that there is a significant variation in health expenditure between the individual countries in the EU. Within the formed two groups of countries – one with a dominant government budget and the other with a dominant health insurance financing, no statistically significant difference in the size of the health expenditure can be found. Such a dependence is found when grouping using other indicators related to geographical loca­tion and living standards.

6th International Scientific Conference on Recent Advances in Information Technology, Tourism, Economics, Management and Agriculture – ITEMA 2022 – Conference Proceedings, Hybrid (University of Maribor, Slovenia), October 27, 2022

ITEMA Conference Proceedings published by: Association of Economists and Managers of the Balkans – Belgrade, Serbia

ITEMA conference partners: Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Maribor, Slovenia; Faculty of Organization and Informatics, University of Zagreb, Varaždin; Faculty of Geography, University of Belgrade, Serbia; Institute of Marketing, Poznan University of Economics and Business, Poland; Faculty of Agriculture, Banat’s University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine ”King Michael I of Romania”, Romania

ITEMA Conference 2022 Conference Proceedings: ISBN 978-86-80194-63-9, ISSN 2683-5991, DOI: https://doi.org/10.31410/ITEMA.2022

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission.

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