American Journal of Economics, Finance and Management Vol. 1, No. 3, 2015, pp. 97-101 http://www.publicscienceframework.org/journal/ajefm * Corresponding author E-mail address: rashidul.alam@icddrb.org (R. A. Mahumud) Trend of Healthcare Expenditures in Bangladesh over Last Decades Rashidul Alam Mahumud * , Marufa Sultana, Abdur Razzaque Sarker Health Economics and Financing Research Group, Centre for Equity and Health System, International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), Dhaka, Bangladesh Abstract Background: The rapid growth of healthcare expenditure has become a great concern for both for private and public viewpoint. Healthcare expenditures comprise a great share of government budget and expenditures and it is the key issue that dominates health policy and its indicators. Objective: The objective of the study is to investigate the trend of determinants of healthcare expenditure after controlling for country-specific economic conditions and comparing between public and private health care spending across the country. Methods: The study extracted cross-sectional and annual time series data from the World Development Indicators over 1995 to 2010 for Bangladesh context. Simple regression analysis and t-test were performed to identify the trend of healthcare expenditure and compared between the private and public healthcare expenditure. Correlation matrix was used to examine the interrelationship among the study variables. Results: Private healthcare expenditure in Bangladesh has been increasing although the public healthcare expenditure has been declining over the period. In correlation matrix results showed that private healthcare expenditure as a share of GDP and GDP growth had a strong positive relationship with the total healthcare expenditure and healthcare expenditure per capita. The study also investigated that there was a significant reverse relationship between public and private sector healthcare expenditure. Conclusion: The study emerge to establish effective public-private partnerships in developing the health sector which can help the policymakers to make long term decisions to improve population health status. Keywords Health Care Expenditure, GDP, Private and Public Sector and Trend Analysis Received: March 23, 2015 / Accepted: April 9, 2015 / Published online: April 10, 2015 @ 2015 The Authors. Published by American Institute of Science. This Open Access article is under the CC BY-NC license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 1. Background Bangladesh has achieved many notable improvements in economic, social and health development over the past decades such as reducing poverty, improving life expectancy, maternal health, fertility control, child mortality. Through, improving health indicators, healthcare expenditures also comprise a great share of government budget and became a key issues that dominates health policy and its indicators [1-2]. The total healthcare expenditure includes spending by both public and private sources like medical goods and services, prevention programs, and administration [3]. The public healthcare expenditures are usually financed through social security contributions, various forms of taxation to various branches of government and from external sources [4]. On the contrary, the private healthcare expenditures encompass private insurance premiums and prepaid schemes, mandated enterprise health expenditure, expenditure on health through non-profit health services and direct of pocket expenditure on health goods, which includes co-payments as well as direct payments by uninsured individuals [5]. A previous study found that adequate and efficient healthcare spending widely considered as expected in the improvement of health status