Healthcare costs projected to outpace economic growth

The nation's health spending will bump up next year as the Affordable Care Act expands insurance coverage to more Americans, and then will grow by an average of 6.2 percent a year over the next decade, according to projections by government actuaries. That estimate is lower than the typical annual increases before the recession hit. Still, the actuaries forecast that in a decade the health care segment of the nation's economy will be larger than it is today, amounting to a fifth of the gross domestic product in 2022. They attributed that to the rising number of baby boomers moving into Medicare and the expectation that the economy will improve, according to a published online in the journal Health Affairs.