Characteristics and Health Care Expenditures of VA Health System Users versus Other Veterans, 2014-2015 (Combined)

Excerpt

Based on data from the 2015 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component (MEPS-HC), nearly one-fifth of U.S. veterans' expenditures for health care was paid by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). In general, eligibility for VA-covered health care requires that a veteran have served in the military for at least 24 months, received an honorable discharge, and met certain criteria with respect to service-connected disability rating, income, and other factors.

Understanding differences between veterans who use the VA health system and those who do not can be helpful in the planning and targeting of health resources for the nation's veterans.¹ This Statistical Brief uses pooled data for 2014 and 2015 from the MEPS-HC to compare various demographic characteristics, health insurance status, and health expenditures (see Definitions" for a description of "expenditures") of VA health system users (hereafter referred to as VA users) to other veterans who received only care that was not covered by the VA (hereafter referred to as non-VA users).

The estimates presented in this Brief are for the 91.9 percent of veterans in 2014-15 with medical expenditures (about 17.1 million persons on average per year),² of whom 37.1 percent were VA users and 62.9 percent were non-VA users. VA users are defined as those with some of their medical expenditures paid by the VA while non-VA users comprise veterans for whom none of their expenditures were paid by the VA in 2014-15. Only differences between these groups that are statistically significant at the 0.05 level or better are described in the text.