text: Reg, you may have been in management and sales of life and health insurance for 60 years, but this does not give you access to the numbers needed to compute total percentage of GDP going to health care.  You have refused to consider that the costs for health services under the heading of personal consumption expenditures might not reflect the total cost of health care in the US.  The fact that the bea.gov website itself says that health care comprises 17-18% of GDP trump's your interpretation of their numbers.  The key is what they mean by health services in the context of personal consumption.  As I said above, a literal interpretation of personal consumption implies that many health costs such as insurance costs paid by employers are not counted.