Latin America and the Caribbean spent the equivalent of $1,518 per person on health in 2024, measured at purchasing power parity, against an average of $6,097 across OECD countries. The figure — a little over a quarter — comes from the third edition of Health at a Glance: Latin America and the Caribbean, published on 28 September 2026 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Bank, which compares indicators across 33 countries in the region.
The report describes a system taking in less public money precisely as demography begins to ask more of it.
A third of the bill is paid by households
Some 32% of the region's total health spending comes directly out of families' pockets, against 20% on average in the OECD. That is the share that passes through neither public nor private insurance: consultations, medicines and procedures paid for at the counter — and the share that pushes households into debt when an expensive illness arrives.
The region is ageing faster than it is hiring
The demographic projection is the spine of the document. People over 65 will nearly double, to 18.1% of the population by 2050, and those over 80 will rise from 1.8% to 4.9%.
Regional life expectancy reached 74.6 years in 2024, 2.4 years more than in 2010, still short of the OECD average of 81.3. Within the region the gap is almost 16 years: Chile (81.5) and Costa Rica (81.1) lead; Haiti (65.1) and Bolivia (68.7) close the list.
The workforce is not keeping pace with that ageing. The region has 2.4 doctors and 3.9 nurses or midwives per 1,000 inhabitants, against 3.6 and 10.3 in the OECD. The distance is far wider in nursing than in medicine — the nursing ratio is less than half — and nursing is precisely the profession that carries the long-term care an older population will require.
Twenty-five million unpaid carers
The report puts a number on the care that goes unpaid: around 25 million people look after older adults without pay, six in ten of them women, while only 3 million do so as paid work. Keeping today's ratio of care with the projected population would require 60.5 million informal carers by 2050.
Avoidable deaths and chronic disease
Avoidable mortality in the region stands at 297 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, against 162 in the OECD. Non-communicable diseases accounted for 75.9% of deaths in 2023.
The most uncomfortable figure is the pace of improvement: between 2010 and 2023 cardiovascular mortality fell 4% in the region while it fell 28.4% in the OECD. For cancer, the decline was 4% against 18%. It is not only that the region is worse off: the gap is widening, because OECD countries are improving several times faster on the two most common causes of death.
"Spend better before spending more"
The authors do not simply call for bigger budgets. Javier Guzmán, of the IDB, summed up the recommendation as spending better before spending more, warning that health budgets will double or triple by 2050 amid fiscal strain. Michele Gragnolati, of the World Bank, pointed to the quality of acute care and said hospitals in the region record higher 30-day cardiovascular mortality than those in OECD countries.
The report devotes specific chapters to quality of care and to inequalities in health and in access to services, alongside sections on health status, determinants, infrastructure, spending and financing, the workforce and ageing.
With information from the OECD, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, EFE, Infobae and Diario Libre.
