The study of the nature of public welfare expenditure in healthcare has gained more attention recently. Many studies suggest that as countries are growing economically, becoming more urbanized and industrialized; their welfare expenditure has also been increased. Other also suggests that countries with higher proportion of older population tend to have larger welfare expenditure. On the other hand, many studies show contradictory findings. This paper thus uses data on ASEAN countries to test the relationship between the factors that have been claimed to have effect on public welfare expenditure, particularly on healthcare. Conducting regression analysis, this study finds that the increase in older persons and industrialization are associated with higher government expenditure on health whereas economic growth, urbanization, old-age dependency ratio, older population and economic openness are negatively correlated with government health expenditure. Despite most of ASEAN countries have relatively developed protection schemes, the scheme are limited to public sector employee and universal coverage, safety net provisions, for the general population is still lacking even though all countries have made commitments to extending social protection. In addressing the issue of ageing, the governments should consider the sustainability of their programs and their short term and long term.