Dental offices earned $87 billion in 2006

After a year of crunching the numbers, the Census Bureau has come up with a figure for the total revenue generated by the dental profession in 2006: $87 billion. Overall, the health care and social assistance sector earned 1.6 trillion, and physicians' offices accounted for $331 billion of it, according to the bureau's latest report.

The health care and social services sector includes hospitals, ambulatory health care like offices of physicians, dentists, and other health practitioners, nursing and residential care facilities, and social assistance like child and youth services, etc.

"The service industries make up about 55 percent of all economic activity in the country," said Mark Wallace, chief of the Census Bureau's service sector statistics division in a press release. "At $1.6 trillion in 2006, the health care and social assistance sector continues to play a strong role in the health of the U.S. economy."

Here are a few highlights from the report:

• The highest contributor to dental offices earnings was private health insurance at $40 billion.
• Patients paid $39 billion as out-of-pocket expenses.
• Medicaid accounted for $3 billion of total income.

According to the report, all four sectors of the healthcare and social services sector had higher revenues in 2006 compared to 2005.