Per capita health care spending. Our goal was to measure thepremiumforastandardizedpackageofhealthbenefitsforworkers ages nineteen to sixty-four in each year from 1979 through 1995. Unfortunately, no nationally reliable data provide direct estimates of this amount. Instead, we used data from the National Health Accounts (supplied by the Office of the Actuary at the Health Care Financing Administration), supplemented by data from the 1977 NationalMedicalCare Expenditure Survey(NMCES),the 1987 National Medical Expenditure Survey (NMES), and the CPS to estimate the total spent on a standard benefitpackage for our subsetof workers in each year. We then divided by the CPS estimate of insured adults to estimate the price of services per person.