Definition: Total health expenditure

Category: Health

Total health expenditure includes: the medical care households receive (ranging from hospitals and physicians to ambulance services and pharmaceutical products), and their health expenses, including cost-sharing and the medicines they buy on their own initiative; government-supplied health services (e.g. schools, vaccination campaigns), investment in clinics, laboratories, etc.; administration costs; research and development; industrial medicine, outlays of voluntary organisations, caritative institutions and non-governmental health plans.