Deloitte: The Young Use Ambulances

Young adults ages 19 to 24 tend to have low overall out-of-pocket health care costs, but they sometimes run up big ambulance bills.

The Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, Washington, and the Deloitte Center for Financial Services, have broken out ambulance expenditures by age in a report they developed to look at total U.S. health care expenditures, including out-of-pocket expenditures on items such as nutritional supplements, health magazines and home health care.

The official government health care cost estimates tend to leave out many of those costs, Deloitte analysts say.

The analysts combined federal National Health Expenditure Accounts data with results from a telephone survey of 1,008 U.S. adults.

Deloitte found that, in 2009, consumers spent about $363 billion on health care services and products that were not included in the official government health expenditure statistics.

One table in the report gives per-capita out-of-pocket expenditures for various categories of expenditures broken out by the consumer’s age.