Good news for the Occupy movement: The 99% have gained some ground.
The 1% of the U.S. population with the highest health care expenses accounted for 21.5% of all health care expenditures in 2013. That may be a lot, but it’s down from 28% in 1996, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
What’s more, the top 5% of the population ranked by their health care expenses dropped to 48.7% of total spending in 2013, after accounting for more than half in 1996, the AHRQ reported.
Health care expenditures for the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population totaled $1.4 trillion in 2013, with mean spending of $4,436 per person. The top 1%, by comparison, had mean spending of $95,200 each, and for the top 5% the figure was $43,253 per person. The top 50% of the population had mean per-person spending of $8,619 and accounted for 97.1% of all health care expenditures, leaving just 2.9% of the total to the lower-cost 50% of the population, the AHRQ said.
Looking at the distribution by race and ethnicity, the top 5% of whites accounted for 45.3% of all spending incurred by whites, compared with 50.8% of all Asian spending for the top 5% of Asians, with corresponding numbers of 56.3% for blacks and 57.3% for Hispanics. Mean spending per person was somewhat reversed, however, at $26,491 for Asian five-percenters, $28,868 for Hispanics, $45,574 for blacks, and $46,809 for whites, according to data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey.
