Health accounts – Volume-price sharing

The health accounts track the expenditure and analyse in detail the final consumption of health care in France and the corresponding financing, whether they are covered by sickness insurance, the State, local authorities, complementary bodies or directly from households. Developed by DREES, the health accounts are one of the satellites of INSEE’s national accounts, whose methodology they adopt. They also serve as a basis for the preparation of health accounts presented in international fora (OECD, Eurostat and WHO HAS system) and thus enable international comparisons to be made on a reliable and harmonised basis. These data are expressed in monetary values (in euros). However, this first approach to value spending is not sufficient to fully understand expenditure developments. Indeed, expenditure in value may change as a result of a change in prices (price effect) or a change in volumes (volume effect). Volumes may vary due to changes in quantities consumed (quantity effect) or changes in quality (quality effect). The decomposition of value changes between volumes and prices (or volume/price sharing) seeks to distinguish all of these effects.