There is a great deal of wildly divergent and sometimes seemingly fabricated information on the size of the US and global healthcare market. For 2014, here are the numbers that I will be using, with my sources, and assumptions and notes.1

 

2012 Annual Healthcare Spend

US Dollars Trillion

Percentage of GDP

Global

7.1

10.1%

US

2.9

17.9%

 

US percentage of global health spend

41%

US percentage of global population

5%

 

Sources

Assumptions

  • The changes in percentage of GDP spent on healthcare per nation are trivial from 2011 to 2012
  • The changes in GDP between 2011 and 2012 are sufficiently significant to merit the combining of percentages from table 1 with the hard numbers from tables 2 and 3 for these two years.

Notes:

1.  These numbers fall into line with the various sources I have reviewed over the past three months.

2.    Certain nations are missing from the data sheet. However, I did sum up all the records myself. My assumption is that the World Bank either smoothed these numbers, or the missing numbers are accounted for elsewhere.