Measuring health care.

• Author: Ainsworth, Joel
• Position: Alaska Trends

In 2006, health care spending accounted for 16 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Currently, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics uses several different models to track employment and costs within the health care industry. One model used measures the fraction of a household budget spent on health care relative to other expenditures.

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The graph below illustrates that the fraction of household income spent on health care services has risen from 5.3 percent in 1997 to approximately 5.9 percent in 2008 when aggregated across the United States. However, since wages and prices for goods and services vary across the United States, regional trends are also shown to...