How Much Has Been Stolen From Global Healthcare Budgets?

This is a very good question, and one which is very hard to answer given the extreme excesses of the Covid era. But we all know, a great deal of money, more than we could possibly imagine, has been stolen or otherwise wasted from the healthcare budgets of every Western nation since the pandemic was declared in early 2020.
We are all so sick of the deep trauma of Covid that most people just want to relegate it to history and don’t even want to talk about it, let alone think about it, dissect it and try to learn from it. Yet learn from it, we must, especially considering the extraordinary degree of wastage and the damage done to our national economies and our personal financial health and wellbeing.
It is only by facing it and learning from those terrible “mistakes” that we can have any chance of making sure it doesn’t happen again, and that way we can avoid the extreme cost of what can only be described as either the biggest blunder – or the biggest assault – that humanity has ever faced.
And we are still paying the costs for that whole disastrous episode.
I don’t often think about the financial cost of it all, but when I was recently chatting to an old friend of mine who now lives in New Zealand, what he said got me thinking. He said, “It’s been a rocky road for New Zealand following Covid. We spent, sorry, wasted, more money per capita than any other country in the world except for the USA. So our economy is still wrecked.”
It exactly mirrored how I feel about our economy here in Canada, and with the recession biting harder each day, as political and economic uncertainty continues to ramp up, I wondered just how much money was spent, and wasted, that could have otherwise been used to preserve both our physical and our financial health.
By the end of 2021, just two years into the pandemic, Canada had established itself as a massive ‘big spender’ on Covid. In March of that year, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation was already raising the alarm that Canada was in the top five spenders per capital in the world, with pandemic spending totalling a huge 15.9% of GDP, at a time when national defence couldn’t even get a measly 1.5%!!
This “Covid extravagance” was all taxpayer or borrowed money, so it will ultimately have to be paid back by ordinary Canadians – you and I – over the hard, frugal decades to come. No doubt that is why we, just like New Zealand, have a badly damaged economy and a grim fiscal outlook.
According to a 2021 report in True North, “Canada spent more on the Covid-19 pandemic than it had during the entirety of World War II. Estimates show that between March 2020 and April 2021, Canada spent $624.2 billion on pandemic initiatives.  When broken down, Canada spent an average of $1.5 billion a day for the entire year.”
In a separate analysis by the Fraser Institute, they concluded that Canada and the United States “wasted billions of taxpayer money on their Covid responses, which was financed entirely through borrowing,” of which an estimated 25% ($156 billion in the case of Canada), at a minimum, was wasted.
To put this into context, of the taxes paid by the average Canadian household of four people between 2020 and 2023, almost $16,000 was completely and utterly wasted.
The Fraser Institute sums up this disaster by saying, “Overall, it’s clear that, over the long-term, Canadians and Americans will face significant ongoing costs to pay for wasteful and poorly targeted government spending during the pandemic.”
Earlier this week, in their excellent commentary on this question, our friends at The Brownstone Institute wrote:
“Many trillions flowed from your pockets in the name of disease control. Over the course of one year from March 2020 to March 2021, transfers amounted to $4.6 trillion [in the United States alone]. These transfers had bipartisan support. The hot money hit the streets and fuelled inflation that sawed off a third of the dollar’s purchasing power. This is the story of our times. No wonder everything seems broken.
The great question: how much was siphoned into waste, fraud, and abuse? We don’t have precise answers, but we have eye-popping evidence of vast pillaging. Presumably, there are ongoing investigations and some limited prosecutions, but there is a very long way to go. We’ll be dealing with this for years.
The entire episode was ghastly – financially and morally. It also unleashed the greatest wave of populist anger we’ve seen in our lifetimes. Trust in government and media has hit new lows, while public health itself is wholly discredited. Lives have been shattered. The cultural consequences are palpable.
It will be years before normalcy returns if it ever does.”

Sources for this article include:
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/fiscal-waste-during-pandemic-canada-and-united-states
https://tnc.news/2021/06/01/canada-spent-624-2-billion-on-covid-19-pandemic-report/
https://www.taxpayer.com/newsroom/canada-was-a-big-pandemic-spender,-but-didn%E2%80%99t-achieve-top-results-report-en_ca
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-08/monster-jobs-report-boosts-canada-but-it-hasn-t-fully-healed