The Growing Difference in

Per Capita Health Care Costs --

1960 to 1997

Americans and the People of the Other Major Industrialized Countries in the World

Table 1 and the tables derived from it are taken from Table 115 on page 283 of a handbook Heath, United States, 1999 (with a Health and Aging Chartbook) published by the National Center for Health Statistics.

The entire handbook can be downloaded from the NCHS website in a PDF file.

In Table 1 , the last column was added to the original table to show the percentage by which all of these countries had much lower per capita health costs in 1997. Even Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Germany, the next highest per capita health cost countries in the World were paying 35 to 40 percent less on a per capita basis than the United States, In fact, excluding these three countries, the remaining 18 countries in Table 1 were paying half as much or less for per capita health care cost than the United States in 1997.

This was not always the case.

In 1975, Table 2 shows that we in the United States were only paying 10 to 20 percent more than the three next high per capita cost countries, and about 25 to 35 percent more than the other countries on the list. Table 3, for 1980, shows a slight increase over 1975.

Sometime between 1980 and 1985, there was a change.

By 1985, Table 4 shows that the health care costs in the United States were growing at a much faster rate than those in the other major industrialized countries of the world. And by 1990, the excess per capita health costs had pretty much reached the levels we continue to see in 1998, 1999, and 2000.

Table 1 - Per capita health costs in 22 countries for 1960, and selected years thereafter to 1997.

Table 2. 1975 Per Capita Health Care Costs

Table 3 - 1980 Per Capita Health Care Costs

Table 4 - 1985 Per Capita Health Care Costs

Table 5 - 1990 Per Capita Health Care Costs

Table 6 - 1994 Per Capita Health Care Costs