It is the prices, stupid! On comparing health spending across countries

Abstract: My talk will focus on the issue of comparing health care expenditure across countries from an International organisation perspective. Firstly, I will describe the System of Health Accounts 2011 standard, in particular with regard to the suggested health products classifications. Secondly, I will comment on the challenge of deriving comparable and representative health prices – in particular in the non-market sector - for spatial and temporal price/volume breakdown. Thirdly, I will discuss the outstanding issue of quality change adjustment. Finally, I will report on the preliminary results of the current work at OECD on comparing hospital price levels across countries.