Health-care spending returns to smaller ‘pre-COVID growth rates’: CIHI report

A new CIHI report predicts that the country will spend 2.8 per cent more on health care in 2023 than last year, but the total is still an overall downwards trend.

Canada is on track to spend slightly more on health care in 2023 than last year, but overall trends show spending will continue to slow following the COVID-19 pandemic, a new report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) shows.

The report released Thursday predicts that the country will spend $344 billion on health care this year, which is $9 billion more, or a 2.8 per cent increase, from 2022.

This year’s growth is small compared to the surge in spending during the peak of the pandemic, which saw a growth of 13.2 per cent in 2020 and 7.8 per cent in 2021. The rate in 2022 was 1.5 per cent.

Ontario is expected to spend about $126 billion on health care this year, which represents about $8,250 per person in the province, while it is $23,652 in Nunavut, the report said.

Growth in spending ranged from lows of 0.4 per cent in Quebec and 0.7 per cent in Ontario to highs of 7.7 per cent in Prince Edward Island and 9.8 per cent in Nunavut. Yukon saw the sole decrease in growth of 0.3 per cent.

Chris Kuchciak, manager of health expenditures at the CIHI, says the new numbers show that the health–care system is moving towards more modest “pre-COVID growth rates” that averaged 4.3 per cent per year between 2015 and 2019.

However, despite the slowdown, investment in the health-care system will gradually rise to meet demands from the industry and Canadians, he says.

“What we’ve seen historically is that health spending continues to grow … relative to income in our economy. And Canadians have identified health care as a high priority,” Kuchciak told Global News.