US Health Care By the Numbers…

• From 2000 to 2005, the proportion of workers aged 18 to 64 with employment-based health benefits fell to 70.6 percent from 74.5 percent.
• A record 46.6 million Americans lacked health insurance last year. Of them, more than 82 percent lived in households headed by someone holding a job.
• The health care industry constitutes 14 percent of the gross domestic product.
• Out of a total population of about 300 million, 35.6 million elderly Americans were on Medicare in 2005.
• Of the working-age population, which reached 257.8 million in 2005, 45.5 million were covered by Medicare, Medicaid or military health programs.
• Another 18.2 million workers had health insurance through public jobs such as state, federal and local governments, public schools and state universities.
• Millions of those workers’ dependents are covered as well. Even if those dependents are not included in the total, taxpayers paid the bill for almost two-fifths of all Americans with insurance in 2005.
• The tax subsidy for employment-related health coverage was $208.6 billion in 2006, or 35.4 percent of the amount spent on premiums.
• In fiscal 2006, spending on Medicare was $378.7 billion and federal spending on Medicaid was $180.6 billion.
• Public expenditures on health care — Medicare, Medicaid, military health care and federal employee benefits — accounted for $888 billion of the $1.96 trillion spent on health care in 2004.
• Adding in the subsidies, and premiums paid for public-sector employees, the total comes to $1.2 trillion, or 61 percent.
• According to Uwe E. Reinhardt, the James Madison professor of political economy at Princeton, the government accounts for about two-thirds of health care spending.
• In 2004, government spending on health care equaled 9.6 percent of the gross domestic product, compared with 6.9 percent in Canada.
   

The Employee Benefits Research Institute
Selden, T: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Data from the National Health Expenditures Accounts
Himmelstein, D: Associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Reinhardt, U: Princeton University