The President of the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF), Cristina Herrero, took part today in the 6th Symposium of the Health Monitor, organised by El Español and Invertia, in a session entitled “A New Approach from Public Health”. During her speech, she emphasised the need to adopt a new approach to healthcare spending management, based on evaluation, efficiency and transparency.
Cristina Herrero highlighted the growing importance of healthcare spending in public accounts — which reached 6.6% of GDP in 2023 — and the pressures, according to AIReF projections, that could raise this figure by more than 1.5 points of GDP over the next 25 years. Given this dynamic, she advocated the need to strengthen the effectiveness and efficiency of managing healthcare resources.
The President recalled the milestones that marked a paradigm shift in this area: from the creation of the Healthcare Spending Working Group in 2004 to the impetus given in 2017 when ECOFIN recommended that Spain implement comprehensive evaluations of public expenditure, thus bringing effectiveness and efficiency to the forefront. The conclusions of these reviews, conducted by AIReF, have been taken into account in decision-making on important issues such as promoting the use of biosimilar medicines and implementing the INVEAT Plan for Technological Renewal in hospitals.
She stated that AIReF’s evaluations provide a rigorous analysis that goes beyond budgetary savings, as these evaluations formulate proposals with a direct and indirect impact on the sustainability of the healthcare system. AIReF is currently evaluating temporary disability benefits, whose spending already accounts for 1% of GDP, placing Spain among the European countries with the highest rates of absenteeism from work.
She also stressed the importance of access to quality data and institutional collaboration. In this regard, she highlighted the agreement signed with the Social Security system for the permanent provision of anonymised individual information, which is key for future evaluations. She also pointed out the need to standardise waiting list statistics across Autonomous Regions (ARs) as a priority challenge that AIReF would be willing to address in future evaluations.
Lastly, she stressed the growing interest of the ARs in AIReF’s evaluations, particularly in the health sector. She highlighted recent commissions from ARs, including Extremadura, Navarre, the Balearic Islands and Murcia, covering areas ranging from pharmaceutical spending to human resources and public procurement. “A new path has been opened in the field of public health; the challenge now is to capitalise on it and consolidate it”, she concluded.
