The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the weaknesses in the public healthcare system in India. The share of ‘private health expenditure’ out of the total health expenditure has been traditionally high in India. But how does it compare with other countries? The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India is deadlier than the first wave and overwhelmed the country’s healthcare systems. Shortage of oxygen cylinders, drugs, ICU beds, vaccines, and even medical practitioners was visible across the country. The pandemic exposed the deep underlying problems in the Indian healthcare system. In an earlier story, it was observed that India lagged behind many other countries in terms of its expenditure on health as a share of GDP. In 2018, as per figures of the World Bank, India’s current expenditure on healthcare accounted for 3.5% of the GDP. Nearly three-fourths of India’s health expenditure is through private funding India’s public spending on healthcare, that is, the money spent by the government, constituted little less than 27% of the current health expenditure in the country in 2018 and domestic private health expenditure constituted more than 72% of India’s current health expenditure as per the figures of the World Bank. Private expenditure includes expenditure by households (out-of-pocket expenditure), corporations, and non-profit organizations. This may be prepaid to voluntary health insurance or paid directly to healthcare institutions. It is evident that private expenditure dominates the healthcare expenditure in India, which means that the people bear the maximum cost of their healthcare. Domestic private health expenditure per capita refers to average current health expenditures funded from domestic private sources spent per person in the country. In order to make the comparison across countries uniform (so as to get the global perspective), per capita, private health expenditures are converted to a common currency (US dollar) and adjusted to take account of the different purchasing power of the national currencies. Current private expenditure on health per capita expressed in international dollars at purchasing power parity (PPP) from the World Bank database is used in this story. The latest data available is from the year 2018. India’s private expenditure has nearly doubled since 2008 India’s domestic private health expenditure per capita in PPP terms has almost doubled from $101.8 in 2008 to $199.1 in 2018. On average, there has been an annual growth of $9.7 in private health expenditure. While the growth was gradual in other years, there was a sudden increase of nearly $35 in the year 2013. To understand India’s position vis-à-vis other nations, we compared the per capita expenditure among developed countries like US, UK, Australia, Denmark, and Sweden (which have a high per capita national income), Indonesia and Vietnam from Southeast Asia, BRICS nations, and India’s neighbours – Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. India’s per capita private expenditure was higher than its neighbours India’s private per capita expenditure in 2018 was higher than that in Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. The private per capita expenditure in the US was 26 times that of India, and in Australia, it was 7.7 times. UK and Denmark had an expenditure of more than $900 per capita while Brazil and Sweden had more than $800 per capita. Russia’s private health expenditure was more than $600 while South Africa’s was close to $500. China’s expenditure was more than double that of India. Among the 15 countries we compared, Bangladesh had the least private health expenditure at $84. The US which had the highest per capita national income also recorded the highest private health expenditure per capita. Barring the Nordic countries- Sweden and Denmark, and China, Brazil, the general trend is that the private health expenditure increased with the national income. It has to be noted that the per capita ‘Gross National Income’ (GNI) is different for each of these countries. A comparison of private health expenditure with per capita GNI indicates that in 2018, a person in the US spent 8.26% of per capita GNI on health while it was around 3.03% in India. This was least in the Nordic countries (around 1.5%). Share of private health expenditure in India & Bangladesh among the top 12 in the world The trend in the share of current health expenditures funded from domestic private sources has been compared for the 15 countries. It is seen that in 2018, Bangladesh and India were among the top 12 countries in the world with the most share of private expenditure in healthcare.