The purpose of this paper is to compare the amount of household health expenditures (HHE) and the proportion of health care expenditure to the household expenditure by ability to pay(ATP) levels. This study has focused on the influence of household ATP on HHE, estimating elasticity of health care expenditures for different ATP groups. For the empirical analysis, the Urban Households Survey Data of 2002 have been used. Our principal findings show that HHE are sensitive to changes in household ATP levels and that the group which is most responsive to changes in A TP level is the lower ATP group. These suggest that as households have less ATP, households with lower ATP reduce expenditures on health care in a proportional manner than those with higher ATP.