Introduction
Greece ranked 27th in the 2022 World Index of Healthcare Innovation, compared to 26th in 2021 and 27th in 2020. Greece struggled across multiple dimensions, ranking 28th in Quality for a second year. Greece also struggled with Fiscal Sustainability, ranking 24th overall, primarily due to its high debt-to-GDP ratio of over 211 percent. Greece’s strongest dimension was Choice (11th).
Background
Western medicine as we know it traces much of its foundation to the contributions of Hippocrates, who was born on the Greek island of Kos around 460 B.C.
For much of the 20th century, Greece offered a robust private health insurance market similar to that of Germany and other former Bismarckian countries, with a diversified range of premiums, benefits, and cost-sharing provisions for patients. However, in 2011, after a protracted fiscal and economic crisis, Greece moved away from this largely private insurance network to a single-payer system administered by the National Organization for Healthcare Provision (EOPYY).