1999 Volume 6 Pages 77-95
A study group in the Institute for Health Economics and Policy, lead by Shigeru Tanaka, developed a universal analytical system that can be applied to all the health care expenditures of a country and named it “Total Domestic Health Expenditures (TDHE).” The TDHE covers not only the Ministry of Health and Welfare statistics on “national health expenditures,” but also various other health related service expenses, operational cost of the third party payers (insurers, concerned government sections and others) and government subsidies to hospitals. The team has continued the study in the past 4 years, improved the analysis methods and conducted international comparison. The international comparison was made possible on the percentage of TDHE against the GDP: 6.5% for Japan, 12.3% for the USA and 9.5% for Germany (1995 figure).
