Table 2.

Characteristics of Hospital Discharges, By Primary Payer, 2006-2008

Characteristic	Medicare	Medicaid	Private	Total
Thousands of discharges (a)	15,140	5,794	11,160	35,190
Gender
Female	55.7%	71.2%	63.5%	59.8%
Age (Years)
0-17	0.0%	2.2%	0.4%	0.5%
18-39	2.5%	55.2%	37.7%	25.7%
40-64	14.4%	37.4%	52.1%	33.4%
65-74	28.5%	2.7%	5.5%	14.7%
75+	54.7%	2.5%	4.4%	25.6%
Race
White	69.3%	31.8%	62.7%	59.1%
Black	9.7%	20.6%	9.4%	12.0%
Hispanic	7.5%	28.4%	9.9%	12.6%
Asian/Pacific Islander	2.3%	3.5%	3.7%	2.9%
Native American	0.4%	0.9%	0.4%	0.5%
Other	10.9%	14.9%	14.0%	13.0%

Source: Authors’ analysis of data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's State Inpatient Databases. Notes: Total column includes discharges from other payers not included in the analysis. Percentages may not sum to 100 because of rounding. (a) Discharges used in the analysis of Inpatient Safety Indicators (a subset of all discharges across the hospitals in our sample).