Improved health outcomes are linked to higher social spending

Countries with higher spending on social care have better health outcomes, a report published by the not for profit research organisation RAND Europe has shown.1

Spending on elderly people appears to have been particularly effective in improving population health, even for apparently unrelated outcomes such as infant mortality and low birth weight. Social spending funded by governments has a four times greater effect than privately funded spending, and as time passes the effects become more evident, possibly because it takes time for social spending to produce better health. Seven years or longer after social spending increases, its effects become more apparent.

The report’s main focus was …