I don't know about Spain, but at least in Sweden there's an argument that the increase in privatization in the health care sector has resulted in higher costs (and thus higher government expenditure) without matching improvement in heath care outcomes.

Raw expenditure tells us nothing about whether or not it has been privatised, too. Often the privatised services are more expensive - after all, they have to pay dividends.

2. CPI won't change a the bottom line take-away. Feel free to run the numbers.

Sure, but what percentage of that government expenditure is going to private health care providers? And how has that number changed over time?

The transference to the private sector in 2002 (thousands of Euros): 25017

In 2010 (the highest of the serie): 81997

In 2016: 54913

I didn't say the "rampant privatization" thing, but, as you can see, the spending more than doubled. Should we take into account the inflation here or not?

GDP per capita is, I think, important as an answer to your opinion of "expenditure is out of control" by the way.

>>"I'm not here for armchair politics."

Good to know, but until where I can see, we were discussing numbers not politics.

EDIT: I keep reading and that data is not right. The number are low, but I can't make sense of the tables. It would take a while to understand it. The good news is the data is there.

Page 9 is central administrative costs, and then, if we put your private expenditure figure into perspective: in 2010 (highest of the series) private costs were €82m vs €69,000m total healthcare costs in 2010. That is a 0.12%

    38.552 €bn * 1.04^(2016-2002)
    =>
    66.76 €bn

As far as I've seen, privatisation seems to normally lead to increases in government expenditure: the US has the highest per capita federal health budgets in the world (and Switzerland, in second place, is far behind)

€1191.25 per capita in 2002.

€1434.55 per capita in 2016.