Health care spending effectiveness is the ratio of an increase in spending per case of illness or injury to an increase in disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) averted per case. This dataset contains health care spending effectiveness ratios in the United States from 1996 to 2016. The ratios were created using comprehensive estimates of health care spending from the Disease Expenditure Study (DEX) and DALYs from the 2017 Global Burden of Disease study (GBD). Changes were decomposed over time to estimate spending per case and DALYs averted per case, while controlling for changes in population size, age-sex structure, and incidence or prevalence of cases.