What Healthcare Costs American Families
I found a wonderful picture that nicely summarizes how much Americans spend on health care each year. The picture was produced by the Milliman company, and represents typical spending for a family of four.
The $22,000 figure represents overall healthcare costs for this family. You’ll see that $12,000 of this money comes from employers. That money doesn’t directly come out of people’s pockets, but it reduces their take-home pay. So, ultimately we all pay that money one way or another. That is a staggering figure. But even the more direct, out-of-pocket costs are quite high – over $5500 to purchase health insurance, and over $3500 of out-of-pocket costs to pay for healthcare services that are not covered by insurance. That last figure dwarfs the amount of money a typical family spends on gasoline in a year.