Challenges for Health Care Financing in Latvia – Comparison with other Baltic Countries

Abstract

Health care is one of the most important fields for society's development and well-being. Different countries have different financing models, and analyses by the international organization OECD are realized with other modeling approaches, including regression analysis. There are going on hard political and academic discussions on the best possible solution for health care financing. The research aims to evaluate possible tendencies in health care financing in Latvia compared with other Baltic countries – Lithuania and Estonia. For data analysis, there were used data of time-series on health expenses from different sources (government, persons, and other sources of health – care financing) in Latvia and compared with tendencies of healthcare expenditure share from GDP in Baltic countries by use of trend analysis. Research results have indicated that health care expenditure increased in all Baltic countries, but the smallest share of health care expenditure during the last years from GDP was in Latvia.