Wasteful health care spending in the U.S. as of 2019, by waste domain

In 2019, it was estimated that up to 935 billion U.S. dollars in U.S. health care spending was wasteful. That is roughly a quarter of the total U.S. health expenditure that year. The Institute of Medicine identified six waste domains: failure of care delivery, failure of care coordination, overtreatment or low-value care, pricing failure fraud and abuse, and administrative complexity. The highest cost of waste came from administrative complexity, at over a quarter trillion U.S. dollars annually, due to the fragmented U.S. health care system. Other comparable countries spend much less on health administration than the U.S. This statistic shows the estimated U.S. health care spending that can be characterized as waste as of 2019, by waste domain.