A decade of health services. Social survey trends in use and expenditure.

During the decade 1953-1963, the Health Information Foundation and the National Opinion Research Center conducted three area probability sample surveys of the country's civilian noninstitutionalized population to determine their utilization of personal health services, expenditures for services, methods of meeting the cost of services, extent of coverage under voluntary health insurance and the relationship of these factors to certain characteristics of individuals and families such as age, sex, place of residence and family income. The present volume is a detailed report of the results of the 1964 survey, reflecting the experience of the population for the year 1963, with some comparative data from the 1953 and 1958 surveys. The sample size was 2,852, with 17 per cent nonrespondents. There were a few surprises: 41 per cent of the sample still considers a general practitioner its regular source of care; of those families who have a personal physician as the regular source of care, 56 per cent have a general practitioner, 12 per cent use a general surgeon and only ten per cent use an internist and eight per cent a pediatrician; only nine per cent of ambulatory patients, aged 65 years and over, are seen in hospital clinics, whereas 81 per cent are seen in the office (and this figure has not changed since 1958, although fewer home visits are made than formerly). As expected, a strong positive correlation was found between income level and percentage of individuals seeing a physician, par-