Much Ado About...5% of the Population

Given all the hoopla, one would think Americans visit their doctors every year as often as their local gasoline stations. For goodness sakes, with an U.S. economy on life-support President Obama chose to devote his first precious year in office fighting to get universal health insurance passed into law, presumably since he thinks most Americans are likely to find themselves in need of hospital "life-support" systems. Access to health care is a crisis in America, right?

In fact, according to a  National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation report, just 5 percent of Americans are responsible for almost half of all health care spending in the United States and for rising premium rates.

Moreover:

• The report stated about half of the U.S. population accounted for only 3.1 percent of all expenditures.
• But 10 percent of the population hogged 63.6 percent of all health spending, the survey found.
• The top 5 percent of the population accounted for 47.5 percent of all spending, and the top 1 percent accounted for 20.2 percent.

(Suppresst would add this observation to the above facts - 100 percent of the 63.6 percent who hogged all the health care spending will die just as surely the 50 percent of population who consumed just 3.1 percent of it.)


Sources:
http://www.nationaljournal.com/healthcare/report-5-percent-of-people-account-for-half-of-u-s-health-care-spending-20110627

http://nihcm.org/images/stories/NIHCM-CostBrief-Email.pdf


http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=20825&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ncpadpd+%28Daily+Policy+Digest%29&utm_content=Google+Reader