Comparative Research for the Healthcare Budget and Burden of Disease in Perspective Resource Allocation

Park, So-Youn; Yoon, Seok-Jun; Park, Hyesook; Jo, Min-Woo; Oh, In-Hwan

In 2018, the MOHW allocated USD 435.1 million for major R&D funds, corresponding to about 3% of the government's 2018 regular budget. Leaving out the non-disease portion of the budget, the MOHW allocated 35.9% of the remainder of its R&D budget to communicable diseases, 64.1% to non-communicable diseases, and 0% to injuries and violence. Fig. 2 shows the distribution of the 2018 MOHW fund allocations across the diseases categories. In this figure, R&D funds and the burden of disease in Korea were not correlated. For example, much part of the MOHW R&D funds were allocated to upgrading the national system for responding to communicable diseases, focusing on prevention of variant infectious disease inflow and spread and on-site responses. However, communicable diseases in Korea only accounted for 2.8% of DALYs in 2015. 7 Non-communicable diseases, on the other hand, accounted for more than 87% of Korean DALYs but were only allocated 64.1% of the MOHW R&D funds. The most salient findings, though, were in the injuries and violence disease group. There was no MOHW funding whatsoever for this disease group. However, injuries and violence such as self-harm, interpersonal injury, or transport injury accounted for 10.1% of the total 2015 DALYs in the KNBD study, even higher than those of the communicable disease category. 6 To further investigate whether the economic burden and funds allocation are aligned, we also compared the differences between them. We noted that the funds were also skewed when compared to economic burden. The economic burden of injury and violence was 9.1%, but injury and violence did not receive any portion of the MOHW total funding (Fig. 2) .