Greece’s total health expenditure financing reached an estimated €20.4 billion in 2025. More than €8 billion came from private sources. The bill is well known. What remains harder to determine with the same precision is what results those billions of euros actually buy.
More than €20 billion is now spent on health care in Greece each year, coming from both the state and citizens’ pockets. But how much “health” does that money actually buy?
The latest data from the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research (IOBE) provide a first picture of 2025 and reveal an interesting contradiction. Total health expenditure financing is estimated to have reached €20.4 billion, up from €19.9 billion in 2024 and €18.9 billion in 2023. The figure, however, is an OECD estimate for 2025 rather than final expenditure data.
8.2% of GDP in 2025
Of the €20.4 billion, approximately €12.35 billion came from public financing and €8.05 billion from private sources. In other words, almost four out of every 10 euros financing health expenditure came from private sources.
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Despite the increase in recent years, total health spending represented 8.2% of GDP in 2025, compared with 8.4% in 2024. In the European Union, the corresponding figure reached 10.4%. The gap is even wider when it comes to public financing: just 5% of Greek GDP, compared with 8.4% across the EU.
The comparison with 2009 is even more revealing. In constant 2020 prices, total health financing in Greece in 2025 remained 20% below 2009 levels, while public financing was 29% lower. Over the same period, total financing increased by 30% in the EU and public financing by 33%.
There is, however, a second bill: the one citizens themselves are required to cover. Public financing accounted for just 60.6% of total health expenditure financing in Greece in 2025, about 20 percentage points below the EU average and 12 percentage points below the average for Southern European countries.
The per-capita picture makes the gap even clearer. Total health spending in Greece amounts to €1,971 per person, compared with €4,508 in the EU. Public spending per person is particularly low, at €1,195, while the European average stands at €3,641. In other words, Greek public health spending per person is roughly one-third of the European average.
Behind these averages, however, there has also been a significant shift in the burden toward the private sector. In 2009, public health spending per person in Greece stood at €1,376, while private spending was €638. By 2025, the two figures had moved in opposite directions: public spending per person had fallen to €1,195, while private spending had risen to €776.
Compared with 2009, this means the state is spending about €181 less per person, while private spending has increased by about €138. IOBE itself notes that the decline in public spending per person was partly offset by the increase in private spending.
In other words, Greece’s distance from Europe is not only about how much money is directed toward health care. It is also about who pays the larger share of the bill.
What are we buying with it?
The numbers therefore provide a fairly clear answer to how much is being spent — and, to some extent, who is paying. They are much less effective at answering the third and perhaps most important question: What are we buying with it?
That question returned with particular force to the debate over health care investment at the recent HealthWorld 2026 conference. Even when we know precisely how much a drug, medical test or hospital stay cost, we know far less about whether that money translated into fewer hospitalizations, fewer heart attacks, earlier diagnoses or more years of healthy life.
Kostas Athanasakis, associate professor of Health Economics at the University of West Attica, identifies this as precisely where the Greek health system is falling short.
“We have to decide what we are going to measure,” he says. Evaluating a policy is not valuable only for determining after the fact whether it succeeded or failed. Its outcome should feed back into the decision-making process, so that an intervention can be continued, corrected or abandoned.
There are cases where this has happened — and the results are striking.
In 2011, a study by what was then the National School of Public Health examined what would happen if the patient copayment for diabetes medications were reduced from 25% to zero. According to Athanasakis, the economic evaluation showed that over a three-year period even the state could benefit: the additional initial expenditure could be offset by the benefits generated by better treatment coverage.
A second example involves biomarkers and is even more telling.
“For every euro you put into reimbursing a biomarker, you will get between nine and 19 back,” Athanasakis says. Reimbursement went ahead. What is missing, he argues, is a permanent mechanism through which scientific evidence is translated into policy decisions.
“Evidence does not systematically become policy,” he says. Yet the paradox is that Greece has an enormous volume of information.
“I cannot hear that we do not have data. This country produces the most data in Europe,” says Kyriakos Souliotis, professor of Health Policy at the University of the Peloponnese.
He immediately identifies the problem: “We have data, but we do not have access to it.”
Electronic prescriptions, medical tests, hospitalizations and diagnoses generate an enormous volume of data every day. Linking that information could, he explains, reveal where waste and resource leakage occur, but above all whether a policy has achieved its actual purpose: improving health.
Even the number of doctors, nurses or hospital beds says little without the “denominator”: how many patients they serve, how severe the cases they treat are and what outcomes they achieve.
That is why Souliotis shifts the discussion from euros to actual health outcomes.
“How much should we reduce heart attacks? How much should we reduce strokes through prevention interventions? How quickly should we diagnose cancer?”