The predictable consequence to the gaps in our health funding? Private spending keeps growing faster than public
Aug. 17, 2026
Toronto Star
By Danyaal Raza, Contributor
Dr. Danyaal Raza is an associate professor at the University of Toronto and a family doctor at St. Michael’s Hospital.
Every budget cycle, we hear the same warning: public health-care spending is unsustainable, and governments can’t afford to invest more. It’s a convenient narrative for politicians looking to freeze or even cut public expenditure.
It’s also not supported by data. In fact, it gets the diagnosis backward.
In four of the past five years, private health-care spending has grown faster than public. And going back to 1988, the starting point for data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, private spending has outgrown public spending in 25 of the past 38 years.
Canadians spend 11.2 per cent of GDP on health care in total. Of that, about 70 per cent is public spending and 30 per cent private, making Canada an outlier among its peers. In Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Norway, more than 80 per cent of total health-care spending is public. The corollary holds, too: private spending is meaningfully higher in Canada.
Compared with Europeans, individual Canadians are expected to absorb a much larger portion of the cost of their own care. The false “unsustainable public spending” narrative obscures where the growth pressure really sits — and who has to bear it.
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