Health spending projected to hit $5.6 trillion in 2025

Five trillion, six hundred and thirty one billion. Or 5,631,000,000,000. Or maybe just $5.6 trillion. Any way you write it out, it’s a big number.

That’s how much will be spent on health care in the U.S. in 2025, up from $3.35 trillion this year, according to new estimates published Wednesday in Health Affairs, a medical journal.

On the one hand, the 5.8 percent annual growth is lower than in previous years. On the other, it’s well above projected gross domestic product growth. In the next decade, one out of every five dollars in the American economy will go to health care.

“Projected national health spending growth, though faster than observed in the recent history, is slower than in the two decades before the recent Great Recession, in part because of trends such as increasing cost sharing in private health insurance plans and various Medicare payment update provisions,” wrote the authors, who are economists in the Office of the Actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in Baltimore.

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