Published on: June 30, 2012

Our grandmothers passed on to us the kitchen table wisdom “Health is wealth” – how did we get to forget it?

A recent Guardian report, “Healthcare spending around the world, country by country”, shows that the adage is particularly important for a resource-poor country like India, where people are the most important resource for the future.

How can we accept the Indian Government spending only 1.2% of GDP on Health? Here are the statistics.

• 4.1% of GDP is spent on health (both Government and Private) or $132 per person
• In India, government spending on health is 29.2% of all health spending
• Private is 70.8% of all health spending. How does private health break down?
  • 86.4% of health spending is ‘out of pocket’ expenses
  • 4.6% is in private health plans
• How big is the medical system?
  • There are 757,377 doctors, which is 6.49 per 10,000 people.
  • For comparison, in the UK there are 27.43 doctors per 10,000 people.

See the Guardian Data Blog’s visualisation of the data: The health spending map of the world

(Data is sourced from the WHO)