Question

How Do You Pay for Your Health Care? Make a list of the health care services that you used last year and estimate the cost of each of those services. Then indicate how these costs were paid, whether by yourself as an out-of-pocket expense or by a health care plan. Write a summary of what you have learned about how your health care expenses are paid.

Answer 1

The distribution of health care costs is strongly age dependent, a phenomenon that takes on increasing relevance as the baby boom generation ages. After the first year of life, health care costs are lowest for children, rise slowly throughout adult life, and increase exponentially after age 50.Bradford and Max (1996) determined that annual costs for the elderly are approximately four to five times those of people in their early teens. Personal health expenditure also rises sharply with age within the Medicare population. The oldest group (85+) consumes three times as much health care per person as those 65–74.