OECD: Polish public spending on health in 2022 below 5%.

The report dedicated to Europe has been appearing alternately with the one dedicated to all OECD countries for several years. It is a mine of knowledge about health care systems, also - about what priority each country gives to this area. In the case of Poland, it is probably difficult to talk about priority at all. The figures for spending, especially public spending, speak for themselves.

In the fifth year of the 7 percent of GDP health law, current public spending, calculated according to a uniform international methodology - and therefore the only comparable one - did not exceed 5 percent of GDP. Total spending, public and private - amounted to 6.4 percent of GDP. This puts us fourth from last among EU countries, but really - second, because two of the last three places are occupied by Ireland and Luxembourg, countries with very high GDP and small populations, which distorts this indicator. In fact, we are only ahead of Romania in total spending, and in terms of public spending we are on a par with Lithuania, Latvia and Bulgaria (although in all these countries combined more is spent on health). The Czech Republic - the Polish benchmark - spends nearly 9 percent (8.8 percent) on health in total, of which 90 percent is public spending. The EU average in total spending is 10.4 percent, nearly 9 percent is public spending. Polish public spending on health is thus almost half the EU average. The EU leader is Germany, with total spending of 12.6 percent of GDP (public spending is approaching 11 percent), followed on the podium by France and Austria, with Belgium, Sweden and Portugal still spending above the EU average on health.

However, the ranking also includes non-EU countries. The bottom, more interesting to us, side of this group's ranking is as follows: Turkey spends the least on health in Europe - 3.7 percent, with about 3 percent being public spending. No country in this group has lower total spending than Poland. Georgia (7.3 percent) and Albania (7.4 percent), however, have public expenditures at a level similar to Turkey's, so clearly lower than Poland's. Moldova (7.7 percent of which 6 percent public) - is clearly ahead of us (although of course Moldova's GDP is incomparably lower than Poland's, at the moment it is the poorest country in Europe). Ukraine's spending is also noteworthy - 8 percent of total spending, about half of which is public. Switzerland is the leader in this group (11.7 percent, including about 8 percent of public spending).