As it has every year in recent memory, national health care spending climbed last year, hitting $3.4 trillion.
Related: Getting creative on insurance costs
The good news, according to report published in the Office of the Actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in Health Affairs, is the increase was smaller than America has come to expect over the past two decades: 4.8 percent.
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The slowdown is largely due to slower growth in spending on Medicaid and prescription drugs.
However, the same analysis projects the U.S. health care system to return to its old tricks, and for health expenditures to 5.6 percent per year between now and 2025.
As a result, health care will eventually account for 20 percent of the U.S. economy, up from its current share of just under 18 percent.
The analysis did not make any assumptions about federal health policy, notably what will happen to the Affordable Care Act.
That Medicaid and prescription drugs saw lower-than-average spending growth might come as a surprise, given the frequent alarm about dramatic price hikes for certain medications and the political firestorm that has surrounded the federal expansion of Medicaid that 31 states have embraced.
While many in Congress continue to argue that the Medicaid expansion, which is almost entirely funded by the federal government, is fiscally reckless, others have pointed to evidence that extending coverage to more of the nation's poor has reduced uncompensated hospital spending and have argued that providing more people with affordable preventative care reduces costly emergency spending.
In addition, a recently-published study reveals promising evidence of ways to reduce Medicaid spending through Accountable Care Organizations. The same study also found ACOs had helped reduce spending — at no discernible cost to quality of care — in Medicare.
It's anything but clear what will come in terms of federal health policy in the coming years. President Trump, after campaigning on immediate repeal of Obamacare, recently said that a repeal bill might not make it to his desk until next year. Congressional Republicans also appear to be hopelessly divided on how to repeal the law and what to replace it with.
Other political matters complicating the forecast for health care spending include division in Congress over value-based payments in Medicare, whether Medicare should negotiate with pharma companies over the price of drugs and whether the U.S. should allow the importation of cheaper prescription drugs from abroad, notably Canada.
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