Concentration of Healthcare Expenditures and Selected Characteristics of High Spenders, U.S. Civilian Noninstitutionalized Population, 2017

In 2017, spending on health care accounted for 17.9 percent of the United States GDP, yet the majority of this spending was concentrated in a relatively small percentage of the population. In fact, about 15 percent of the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population had no health care expenditures in 2017, and only 5 percent of the population accounted for over half of health care spending. This includes all sources of payments for medical care, including private insurance payments, Medicare, Medicaid, out-of-pocket spending, and other sources. In this Statistical Brief, data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component (MEPS-HC) are used to describe the overall concentration of health care expenses across the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population in 2017. In addition, different spending tiers are compared on selected dimensions including age, race/ethnicity, type of medical service, and aggregate spending distributions by source of payment. All differences discussed in the text are statistically significant at the 0.05 level.