Health care spending is not evenly distributed
How much a country spends on healthcare shapes the strength and resilience of its health system. Global healthcare spending reached $10.6 trillion in 2023, but that money is not evenly spent.
High-income countries, which account for 78% of total health spending, generally spend enough to fund universal coverage, preventive care, and robust health infrastructure. These countries spend on average $3,038 per person on healthcare. Here people can expect to live as long as 80 years. Low-income countries spend just $45 per person – 67 times less. In these countries life expectancy is just 65 years.
Governments cover a smaller share of health costs, leaving households to pick up the difference. This means that health needs are not met and health crises can be economically devastating. Out-of-pocket payments account for 43% of health spending in low-income countries, compared to around 13% in high-income ones.
External aid helps close the gap, but support is unreliable. Health aid from major donors including the US, UK, Germany, and France has been cut in recent years, leaving the most underfunded systems more exposed.
In the chart above, each country’s size represents its total health spending.
The United States and other high-income countries including Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and France dominate while other countries’ spending is dwarfed.
Many low- and middle-income countries are barely visible, yet are home to billions of people. How that money is distributed, and who it reaches, remains one of the starkest measures of inequality between nations. The countries that need the most spend the least, and the external support meant to bridge that divide is shrinking.
Data note
Health spending figures are from the WHO Global Health Expenditure Database (GHED), expressed in constant 2023 US dollars. Fiscal year 2023 World Bank income classifications are used and countries without a World Bank income classification are excluded. Countries spending below $500 million are omitted because their cells would be too small to display meaningfully. To keep smaller countries visible alongside the largest spenders, a power compression is applied to the cell sizing: spending below $10 billion is scaled up using a power function (exponent 0.75) to slightly overstate the relative area of smaller spenders. All per person values shown in the story are median values of their relevant income group.