Hospitals are jammed up despite being well-resourced. Funding for health care is the highest it has ever been, outside covid. After stabilising in the 2010s, spending in the OECD rose to nearly 10% of GDP following the pandemic. Median spending per person in Europe has risen 13% in constant prices since 2019. There are also more helping hands. Hospitals added nearly 140,000 jobs in America last year, more than the entire rest of the economy. Hiring by England’s National Health Service has increased sharply: its headcount has grown by 25% since 2019 to employ some 1.4m people—or 2% of the population.
All this presents a productivity puzzle. Some hospitals seem to be faring worse with more resources. In Australia, where the hospital workforce grew by almost 20% from 2019-24, elective surgeries are basically flat—the only difference is that the sick are waiting longer to be seen. Though there has been a gradual recovery, “On any measure you want to use in England, productivity is below where it was pre-pandemic,” says Max Warner of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank in London.