The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released figures this week about health care spending in the United States for 2006 (pdf). The total amount: $2.1 trillion. That’s 16 percent of GDP. Or a little more than $7,000 per person. A few details and thoughts:

+ If you’re concerned about government taking over health care… you may be too late. Spending by governments accounted for 40 percent of that $2.1 trillion. That’s the largest single slice of the “who’s paying” pie. Households were next at 31 percent, followed by businesses at 25 percent. The ranks of people 65 and older are going to swell in the next few decades (pdf), so government’s slice of that pie almost surely will increase as more people go on Medicare.

+ For all the attention they get about their cost, prescription drugs are still only the third largest expenditure by category ($216.7 billion). We spend roughly three times that much on hospitals, and a little more than twice that on physicians and clinical services.

+ So what are getting in return for those trillions? On an individual level some of us are probably doing very well, but as a country maybe we should be looking for a partial refund. Or at least, have a stern conversation with someone on the customer service line. A study published in Health Affairs this week reported that the US ranks last among the 19 leading industrial countries in preventable deaths from treatable diseases. The number one country in the study was France, which spends roughly half what the US does on health care per person.

-Greg Dahlmann