The Sickest 1 percent Account for 21 percent of US Healthcare Spending

• Patients among the costliest 1 percent, whose ranks no one wants to join, consumed 21 percent of the nearly $1.3 trillion Americans spent on health care in 2010. 
• That amounts to a cost of nearly $88,000 per person. 
• 5 percent of patients accounted for 50 percent of all health-care expenditures. 
• By contrast, the bottom 50 percent of patients accounted for just 2.8 percent of spending that year, according to a recent report by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
• In 2010, the top 5 percent of males accounted for 55.7 percent of health care expenditures incurred by this subpopulation with an annual mean of $40,852. 
• Among females, the top 5 percent were associated with 45.1 per of health care expenditures for this subgroup, with mean expenditures of $40,617.