This paper investigates the impact of policies and institutions on health expenditures for a large panel of OECD countries for the period 2000-10. We use a set of 20 policy and institutional indicators developed by the OECD characterising the main supply-side, demand-side, and public management, coordination and financing features of health systems. The impact of these indicators is tested alongside control variables related to demographic (dependency ratio) and non-demographic (income, prices and technology) drivers of health expenditures per capita. Overall, there is a reasonably good fit between the expected signs of the coefficients for the institutional indicators and the actual estimates. By integrating the role of policies and institutions, together with the other primary determinants, our analysis is able to explain most of the cross-country variation in public health expenditures.