August 23, 1999 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)
Health insurance now accounts for
biggest share of health care dollar
Between 1987 and 1997, health
insurance supplanted medical services as the largest component of consumer health care
expenditures in every region. In one region, the Northeast, the share of health care
spending going toward insurance was over 50 percent in 1997.
![Percent of health care dollars spent on health insurance and on medical services by region, 1987 and 1997](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20120925063435im_/http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/images/1999/Aug/wk4/art01.gif)
[Chart data—TXT]
The proportion of out-of-pocket health care spending on
insurance in the Northeast was 32.5 percent in 1987 and in ten years this share had risen
to 51.0 percent. As a result, the Northeast went from having the smallest share spent on
insurance to having the largest. The share of health-care spending devoted to medical
services in the Northeast fell from 43.9 percent in 1987 to 28.1 percent in 1997.
There was a somewhat similar pattern of change across the country. In each of the
regions, the biggest share of the consumer health care dollar was spent on medical
services in 1987 and on health insurance in 1997. For each region, the share devoted to
health insurance increased by at least 10 percentage points and the share devoted to
medical services decreased by at least 10 percentage points over the period.
These data are a product of the BLS Consumer
Expenditure Survey program. Additional information is available from "Issues in
Labor Statistics: What the Nation Spends on Health Care: A Regional Comparison," (PDF 20K).
Of interest
Spotlight on Statistics: National Hispanic Heritage Month
In this Spotlight, we take a look at the Hispanic labor force—including labor force participation, employment and unemployment, educational attainment, geographic location, country of birth, earnings, consumer expenditures, time use, workplace injuries, and employment projections.
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