The United States spends a lot of money on healthcare. To better understand how much, who spends it, and what it’s spent on, we dug into the federal government’s data.
In 2024, the most recent year for which data was available, the U.S. spent $5.3 trillion on healthcare. That means an average of more than $14.4 billion was spent each day, and more than $10 million each minute.
Health spending per person increased to an average of $15,474 in 2024, not necessarily because we’re sicker, but because of increased prices. According to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, the U.S. has half as many in-person doctor consultations per person as peer countries. In other words, we pay more for less care.
For more than two decades, hospital care has been the largest category of healthcare spending. It’s expected to remain the largest share over the next decade, though the federal government projects that retail prescription drug spending will rise 5.7% a year on average — slightly faster than hospital care.
Patients in the U.S. are shouldering higher insurance premium payments and other out-of-pocket costs. People have told KFF Health News that they are forgoing health insurance coverage, rationing their medications, cutting back on doctor visits, and putting off health procedures.
Federal data delineates the main sources of healthcare spending as private health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, out-of-pocket costs, and other programs. Households, governments, businesses, and other private entities are responsible for financing those sources.
Many current federal healthcare proposals focus on shifting costs from one funder to another rather than lowering them. For example, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, enacted in 2025, shifted more government spending onto households, increasing the burden on low-income patients. If Congress were to restore covid-era subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans, costs would shift back toward government, which is funded disproportionately by wealthier taxpayers.
Meanwhile, healthcare costs are eating up a growing share of our economy. The $5.3 trillion spent on healthcare in 2024 accounted for 18% of the nation’s gross domestic product that year.
And those costs are expected to continue growing faster than the overall economy, hitting 20% of the nation’s gross domestic product by 2032.
“We’re not going to be able to finance our way out of healthcare spending that’s growing faster than GDP,” said Michael Chernew, a professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School. “We’ll all end up with healthcare and no clothes or houses or cars.”
Sam Whitehead contributed to this report.
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