The United States spends a larger share of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on health care than any other major industrialized country. To address high health care costs in this country, policymakers need to understand how those costs are distributed across types of services, different payers and by selected characteristics of the population. This Statistical Brief presents estimates of the percentage of persons with health care expenses by type of service, and mean and median expense per person with an expense by age and insurance status for the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population in 2014.
Health care expenses, as reported in this Brief, represent payments to hospitals, physicians, and other health care providers based on utilization information collected in the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component (MEPS-HC) and payment data collected in both the MEPS-HC and Medical Provider Components (MEPS-MPC). Expense estimates include amounts paid by individuals, private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and other payment sources. All differences between estimates discussed in the text are statistically significant at the 0.05 level.