Nearly all countries suffer from the rise of the health expenditure . There are a lot of reasons, for example: the increase of income, the extension of lifespan, the aging of population, the progress of medical science and technology, and the increase of health care service provision. However, with the increase of health expenditure, the personnel and the health facilities, whether the healthcare utilization inevitably increases or not? And whether the national health status improved or not along with the increase of health care utilization?
One of the final goals in the health care system is to promote the populace health (WHO, 2000). There are a lot of factors to influence health, and the medical service is only one of them. The related literature discussing the percentage of health expenditure in GDP are many, but few of them discusses the influence of GDP to health resource, even fewer involves how GDP and the health resources affect the health care utilization, and they are even in lack of the influence of the health expenditure, health resources and health care utilization to the health status.
OECD altogether has 30 member nations. OECD has the consistent standard and accuracy of the related data collection and coordination. Although Taiwan is the non-member nation, the implementation of its National Health Insurance and the statistics of its health disbursement in the Department of Health (National Health expenditure, NHE) also connect to the international rail, and it has reached the OECD nation?s standard. Therefore, Taiwan may count as one of the member nations. We can discuss their correlations and compare their disparity between the actual value and expected value, from the aspects of systems, economics, manpower, facilities, health care utilization and populace health as well.
The result showed that the ratio of the health expenditure in government institutes to the total health expenditure notably influences the medical
expenditure (Per capita HE and percentage of HE to GDP), the medical resources (the number of doctors and beds per thousand population), and the health care utilization (the number of patients checking out the hospital per thousand population).
According to this research pattern, compared with the analysis of the OECD countries materials, Taiwan relatively consumes less GDP on health care, but obtains more health care service (hospitalized and outpatient service), and the nation enjoys a better health status.
