TABLE 7.

Estimates of Certain Large Payers' Contributions to the Annual Costs of Health Care for Each Population Segment

Population	Total Cost/Year	Commercial	Medicare	Medicaid	Veterans
1. Healthy	˜$130 billion	High	Low	Low	Low
2. Maternal and infant health	˜$60 billion	Average	Very low	High	Very low
3. Acutely ill but mostly curable	˜$300 billion	Average	Average	Average	Average
4. Chronic with adequate function	˜$800 billion	Average	High	Average	High
5. Stable with significant disability (often not elderly)	˜$290 billion	Low	High	High	High
6. Short period of decline near death (mostly cancer)	˜$50 billion	Low	High	Average	High
7. Intermittent exacerbations and sudden death (mostly heart and lung failure)	˜$100 billion	Low	High	Average	High
8. Long dwindling course (mostly frailty and dementia)	˜$270 billion	Low	High	High	High

Note: These are rough estimates of “column percentage.”“High” means that this payer will pay more toward this population segment than would be predicted just by the proportion of overall health costs that this payer supports. Since costs are linked to population size, this also means that “high” indicates that more patients of this sort rely on this payer than would be the case if patients were allocated randomly across payers.