In 2016, 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 2016, and only 5 percent of the population accounted for half of health care spending. This includes all sources of payment for medical care, including private insurance payments, Medicare, Medicaid, out-of-pocket spending, and other sources.
In this Statistical Brief, data from the Household Component of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS-HC) are used to describe the overall concentration of health care expenses across the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population in 2016. 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.