Canada has single-payer healthcare. Under this model, basic services are provided by private doctors and the entire fee is paid for by the government (mostly provincial). Overall, healthcare spending accounts for over 10% of Canada's GDP. Although most services are free at point-of-use, there are several services that are not covered. These services are typically paid for by private insurance companies, or out of the patient's own pocket.
This visualization shows how the public sector (i.e. provincial taxes) and the private sector (i.e. private insurance companies) spends money. You can further examine the trends of individual categories by clicking on the layer you are interested in. All values are adjusted for inflation; proportions were calculated using current dollars.
One thing to note is that the scale of spending is very different between private and public sectors. For example, in 2015, over $155B in public funds were spent on healthcare while, the private sector spent approximately $64B - less than half . You can get a better sense of this difference and better see how each category is funded by clicking on the category filters.
Data is from the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
It looks like the distribution of healthcare spending in both sectors has remained relatively constant over the past 41 years.
It's clear that hospital spending is the biggest use of public funds. The amount the public sector spends on hospitals has decreased over 17% from 1975 to 2015. However, looking at the private sector chart, it looks like the proportion spent on hospitals there has also decreased. Does this mean that hospitals have become more efficient/cost effective? Or, does it mean that the quality of patient care has decreased?
Meanwhile, there has been a steady increase of spending on drugs from both sectors. The proportion of drug spending covered by public funds has gone up over 6%. Are healthcare professionals prescribing drugs more frequently? Or has the overall cost of drugs has increased?
Looking at the administration filter I noticed that a much larger proportion of private funds are spent here. I was unable to determine what exactly this category entails. Are these essential services or overhead costs? I suspect that the private sector has much more overhead than the public sector. Supporters of universal healthcare could argue that the public healthcare is more cost-effective than a privatized system because it eliminates the need for advertising or other things that don't actually improve patient care.
All code on GitHub. Inspiration from Flowing Data's Causes of Death and Mike Bostock's stacked area chart.