Key Facts About Health Care Affordability for People With Medicare

This brief draws on data from various sources. Data on income and savings of Medicare beneficiaries, including the share of beneficiaries who relied on Social Security for at 75% or 90% or more of their total per capita income and the number of Medicare beneficiaries who spent more than 10% of their annual per capita income on Part B premiums, are drawn from the Urban Institute’s Dynamic Simulation of Income Model (DYNASIM4). See Methods of KFF, “Income and Assets of Medicare Beneficiaries in 2024” (August 2025) for more details.

Data on out-of-pocket health care spending are from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, 2023 Cost Supplement File (the most recent year of data available). For the analysis on average out-of-pocket spending as a share of average per capita Social Security income, see the methods of KFF, “Health Costs Consume a Large Portion of Income for Millions of People with Medicare” (August 2025) for more details.

The 2024 Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is used to assess the financial burden of health care spending among households where all members are covered by Medicare (referred to as Medicare households) compared to households where no members are covered by Medicare (referred to as non-Medicare households). The CE is a survey of households (“consumer units”), excluding people residing in institutions such as long-term care facilities. The estimates presented in this analysis are averages for demographic groups of consumer units, not per capita estimates, and thus are not comparable to estimates based on other surveys that report per capita estimates, such as out-of-pocket health care spending reported in the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey. 

Estimates of Medigap premiums are based on KFF analysis of Medicare Supplement Market Data from Mark Farrah Associates Health Coverage Portal ^TM, 2023. See methods of KFF, “Key Facts About Medigap Enrollment and Premiums for Medicare Beneficiaries” (October 2024) for more details.

Data on annual Medicare premiums, deductibles, and other cost sharing over time are based on KFF analysis of the 2025 Annual Report of the Boards of Trustees of the Federal Hospital Insurance and Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Funds.