Quick Health Facts (with Sources)

Selected Health Status Indicators in the United States

At a Glance
Health Status
U.S. Life Expectancy: 77.9 years
Infant Mortality Rate: 6.75 per 1000
Adult Obesity Rate: 33.8%
Adult Smokers: 17.2%
Numbers of Americans with Chronic Conditions
Hypertension: 74.5 million
Mental Illness: 57.7 million
Asthma: 34.1 million
Heart Disease: 29.8 million
Diabetes: 23.6 million
Cancer: 11.7 million
Back Pain: 1 in 4 per three month period
HIV: 1.2 million
Health Care Use and Expenditures
U.S. Per Person Health Care Expenditures: $7,960
U.S. Health Care Encounters Per Year: 1.2 billion
Percentage of Health Care Expenditures Attributable to Top 1%: 21.8%
Number of Hospital Admissions in 2010 (5,754 hospitals): 36.9 million
Number of Encounters at FQHCs in 2009 (8,000 sites): 74 million
Number of People Living in Nursing Homes: 1.5 million
Average Years of Life Lost Per Person With the Following Conditions
Serious Mental Illnesses: 25.8
All Cancers: 15.5
Obesity: 13


Detail and Source for Each Data Point
Health Status
United States Life Expectancy (2007):  77.9 years

Infant Mortality Rate (2007): 6.75 per 1000 live births

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

49.3% of Americans report that they exercise at least three times per week.

http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20100121/are-americans-backing-off-exercise

33.8% of adults were obese in 2010. (See an animated state-by-state trend map using the following link.)

http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html

17.2% of adult Americans smoked in 2010.  For a state by state comparison, use the following link.

http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparemaptable.jsp?ind=80&cat=2

Unhealthy communities contribute to poorer health status among Americans.  The odds that an American will be obese increase by 10%, or will have hypertension increase by 6%, with each significant increase in the degree of sprawl in his or her home community.

http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/healthreportes.html

Common Serious Chronic Conditions in the United States

Hypertension. 74.5 million Americans have high blood pressure. Hypertension is the most commonly diagnosed condition in America.
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4621
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/docvisit.htm
Mental Illness.  An estimated 57.5 million American adults (26.2%) have a diagnsoable mental illness each year.  One quarter of these have a serious mental illness.  Serious mental illnesses can reduce life expectancy by 25 years or more.
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental-disorders-in-america/index.shtml
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/statistics/2YEARS_STATE.shtml
Asthma.  34.1 million Americans have asthma.
http://www.aaaai.org/media/statistics/asthma-statistics.asp
Other Heart Disease. 29.8 million Americans had heart diseases (stroke, heart attack, angina, heart failure) in addition to, or apart from, hypertension.  Cardiovascular diseases accounted for 34.3% of all deaths.
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4478
Diabetes. 23.6 million Americans (and 10.7% of all American adults) have diabetes.
http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/diabetes-statistics/
Cancer.  11.7 million Americans were living with cancer in 2007.
http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancerbasics/cancer-prevalence
Back Pain.  One-fourth of adults have at least 1 day of back pain every 3 months
http://www.niams.nih.gov/Health_Info/Back_Pain/default.asp
HIV.  An estimated 1.2 Americans are living with HIV infection.  One in five are unaware that they are infected.
http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/factsheets/us.htm

Health Care Use in the United States

In 2009, health care expenditures in the United States totaled $7,960 per person, highest in the world.  In second place was Norway, spending just $5,352.
http://www.oecd.org/document/16/0,3746,en_2649_37407_2085200_1_1_1_37407,00.html


Based on 2008 data, every year each American makes, on average:

·         1.9 visits to a primary care physician, plus

·         1.3 visits to one or more specialists, and

·         and the remainder either to a hospital, emergency, or outpatient department, totaling

·         3.8 health care encounters (total) each year. 

Collectively, people in the United States had 1.2 billion health care encounters in 2010.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/docvisit.htm

In 2009, the top 1% of the U.S. population (in terms of health care expenditures) accounted for 21.8% of all health care expenditures.  Their mean expenditure was $90,601.  The top 5% accounted for nearly half of all expenditures.
http://meps.ahrq.gov/mepsweb/data_files/publications/st354/stat354.pdf


36.9 million people in the United States were admitted to 5,754 hospitals in 2010. Total expenses were just over $750 billion.  (Total annual US health care expenditures are around $2.5 trillion.)

http://www.aha.org/aha/resource-center/Statistics-and-Studies/fast-facts.html

20 million people accounted for nearly 74 million encounters at 8,000 delivery sites at Federally Qualified Health Centers in the United States in 2009.

http://www.nachc.com/client/US10.pdf

1.5 million people in the United States live in nursing homes.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/nursingh.htm

Years of Life Lost to Selected Chronic Conditions

Source data for this chart come from the following sources:

http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/289/2/187.full.pdf

http://progressreport.cancer.gov/doc_detail.asp?pid=1&did=2007&chid=76&coid=730&mid=

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/statistics/2YEARS_STATE.shtml

The obesity data from the JAMA article are for a 20 year old white male.  As the full article describes, data for comparably-aged females are lower, and for black males higher.  They are also different across age groups.  I used the 20 year old for comparison because serious mental illness most often occurs in young adult years.  The cancer data are for all cancers -- childhood cancers cost more years of life lost.  I chose this number because the NCI presented it as the average in its 2009-2010 update.  The mental illness data are for public patients in seven states reporting the data from a sixteen state survey.  The full table of the states is available on the NIMH web site; 25.8 years of life lost was the simple average of the data from all seven states.