Analyzing and management of health care expendittire and gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate by adaptive neuro-fuzzy technique

Expenditures on health care continue to increase substantially, both absolutely and relative to national income, throughout most of the developed world. The main goal in this study was to analyze the influence of health care expenditures on the economic growth. Gross domestic product (GDP) was used as economic growth indicator. The method of ANFIS (adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system) was applied to the data in order to select the most influential factors for the GDP growth rate forecasting. The ANFIS process for variable selection was also implemented in order to detect the predominant factors affecting the forecasting of economic growth. According the results the total health care expenditure has the highest influence on the GDP growth rate forecasting. The improvements in health status will be worth the effort even if they turn out to have little effect on growth. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.