Healthcare in the Netherlands is not ready for the future. The government lacks sharp and clear choices. If politics continues to delay making difficult decisions, healthcare as we know it today will no longer be self-evident.
That is the tenor of the report ‘Choosing sustainability. People, resources and social support’ of the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR). In it, the WRR takes a close look at current health policy and explains how things can be improved.
Councilor Marianne de Visser is the first to admit that the collected facts are generally not new. It is about the urgency and the coherence between the numerous bottlenecks, she says. “We are sounding the alarm.”
Rising health care expenditure
A major problem is the rising health care expenditure, which now amounts to around one hundred billion euros a year. The WRR warns that expenditures will triple in 40 years due to an aging population, an expected increase in the number of chronically ill and deteriorating lifestyles. An increase that is greater than the average economic growth. In other words, healthcare threatens to eat away at our prosperity growth, according to the report.
Now about one in six to seven Dutch people works in healthcare, in twenty years that would be one in four, in 2060 one in three.
“These are numbers that cannot actually correspond to reality,” says De Visser. “In addition, they mean that if you use all that money and all those people for healthcare, you cannot use them for other public purposes. For example, education. It will pinch on all sides.”
–
