The concentration of health care expenditures, revisited

In two previous publications, we described the distribution of health care expenditures among the civilian, noninstitutionalized U.S. population, spec ifically in terms of the share of aggregate expenditures accounted for by t he top spenders in the distribution. Our focus revealed considerably skewed distribution, with a relatively small proportion of the population account ing for a large share of expenditures. In this paper we update our previous tabulations (last computed using data more than a decade old) with new dat a from the 1996 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). Our findings show that the skewed concentration of health care expenditures has remained very stable; 5 percent of the population accounts for the majority of health ex penditures.