The point of this post is to identify a good comparative measure of health care funding across countries, then to apply that to the UK, and then to address the question of if it is reasonable, compared to other countries, to expand the care the NHS can provide.
Please remember the measures mentioned below are not exact because of different definitions, changing exchange rates, the difficulty of making sure the data used is reliably from the same year, and other “moving parts”; having said that the numbers can be taken as strongly indicative because they are from WHO (World Health Organisation) and NSO (UK National Statistical Office) sources. The most often used measure of total health expenditure is the amount of GDP spent on health care (GDP – “gross domestic product”, or simply put, the total value of what we produced in the country.)
The recent level of UK GDP was $3.07 trillion, 6th highest in the world. Data on the amount of our GDP spent on total health expenditure showed that the UK ranked 17th (up from 20th 2 years earlier). If we look deeper, at how much of the UK GDP spent per head of population on health care, the UK ranked 11th, at $3864 per head. About 83% of UK total health expenditure went on the National Health Service, and 17% on private health care provision. These numbers mean that compared with 10 other countries, the UK could have increased total health expenditure and stayed within the bounds of currently observed international spending levels of GDP per person spent on health care.
Is there a reason that we should not be closer to the top of the list than 11th? The point of citing these numbers is to support my view that 1. It would be perfectly reasonable to spend more money per person on the NHS and 2. If we want better and more readily available health care, the financial means, if not the political and social will, are available to fund it. Simply put, in the UK we seem to choose a poorer quality of life when funds can reasonably be available to improve it. Again, simply put, if we want a better quality of life through improved health care, we need to accept that the proportion of GDP spent on health care must be higher, and that implies our being willing to pay more tax for overall better population wellbeing.