Britain Debates Costs of Free Home Care for Elderly - NYTimes.com

By JULIA WERDIGIER
Governments across Europe are struggling to cope with the needs of rapidly aging populations at a time of shrinking revenue.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is facing a tough election, probably this spring, has pledged free home care for elderly people with “severe care needs” in England and Wales, regardless of a person’s financial situation. The change would be a fundamental shift from the country’s traditionally means-tested system.

But the plan is already proving controversial because it would require additional spending when Britain is under pressure to substantially cut its record budget deficit.
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Multinational Comparisons of Health Systems Data, 2009 - The Commonwealth Fund

by Gerard F. Anderson and Patricia Markovich

International comparisons of health care systems offer valuable tools to health ministers, policymakers, and academics wishing to evaluate the performance of their country's system. In this chartbook, data collected by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)is used to compare health care systems and performance on a range of topics, including spending, hospitals, physicians, pharmaceuticals, prevention, and mortality. We present data across several industrialized countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy , the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Whenever possible, the authors present the median value of all 30 members of the OECD.
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Stop citing spending ratios! - The Hill's Pundits Blog

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By Terence Kane

There is a lot to like about David Brooks’s column today in The New York Times. I do want to respond briefly to his point about spending on children and seniors. Brooks cites a recent study by Julia Isaacs at the Brookings Institution that lists the ratio of federal spending between seniors and children at 7:1. Various other columnists have picked up this headline-generating ratio. Notice, pundits rarely use the 2.4:1 ratio for all government spending — most government spending on children is at the local and state level — since it plays less into their selected narrative. More broadly, it does not matter what ratio they cite; they are both deeply flawed.

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