Health Expenditure Australia 2019-20

The ANHA aims to support a long term, whole-of-system understanding of national health spending, and where possible classifies health expenditure in terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s system of health accounts (OECD SHA) categories (AIHW 2003). The 3 key dimensions of the OECD SHA classification system are health care by functions of care, providers of health care services, and health care financing scheme.

There are other estimates of health funding and expenditure in Australia, including those produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). There are also sources of data from specific funding programs and bodies, such as those of the National Health Funding Body (NHFB) and large funding programs like the Medicare Benefits Scheme (MBS). However, the ANHA varies from these in a variety of ways, including its scope (other estimates tend to focus on specific funding programs, jurisdictions or time periods) and, methodology and classification system used to derive estimates.

The health expenditure estimates from the ANHA do not currently include:

• some local government spending
• health spending by some non-government organisations, such as the National Heart Foundation and Diabetes Australia
• occupational health spending by non-government sources such as private enterprises
• spending on the health-care component of high-level residential care.

Education and training of health professionals and many forms of spending with an outcome that would indirectly impact health – such as the production of more nutritious food, road safety or law and order – are also not included.

The ANHA is derived from more than 50 data sources capturing health spending by governments, individuals, insurance providers and other private sources, such as some private hospital spending and research. The expenditure estimates are collated and stored in the AIHW’s Health Expenditure Database (HED).

The data sources are discussed in detail in Data processing and listed in Table T2.

There are often revisions to previously published estimates of health expenditure, due to receipt of additional or revised data from data suppliers, or changes in estimation methods. The AIHW typically provides back-casting for any changes in the methodology or data sources. As a result, comparisons over time should be based on the estimates provided in the most recent publication.