National health spending will jump by 6.1% next year when key provisions of the federal health-overhaul law take effect, a slower growth pace than previously expected, federal number-crunchers projected Wednesday.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the rise would result from more Americans gaining insurance coverage and using more care. But it said the growth would be slower than the 7.4% pace anticipated a year ago, in part because of a June 2012 Supreme Court decision that allowed states to avoid expanding their Medicaid programs under the health overhaul.
Some seven million uninsured people could end up without access to federally funded coverage because they live in one of the 28 states that might sit out the Medicaid expansion in 2014.
The federal analysts projected that the amount the U.S. spends on health care—from both public and private sources—will grow to almost $3.1 trillion in 2014 from $2.9 trillion in 2013.
In addition to the Medicaid changes, the analysts attributed the slower rise in spending to sluggish economic growth after the recession and consumers remaining "sensitive to rising health care costs." Employers are trying to control their health costs, they said.
Recent government figures have shown that medical prices are rising at their slowest pace in a half century. One reason is the emergence of less-generous health plans that force patients to pay more attention to prices, or in some cases forgo care.
The spending projections, published Wednesday in the journal Health Affairs, are likely to be the Obama administration's final assessment of the impact of its signature health law ahead of the opening of the law's insurance exchanges Oct. 1 for people to enroll in coverage that takes effect Jan. 1.
The law contains few sweeping measures designed to control health costs, but it does have some provisions aimed at curbing the growth of reimbursements to providers treating elderly patients in the federal Medicare insurance program. Also, a tax taking effect in 2018 on employers with high-cost health plans may force employers to manage their plans more tightly.
Health costs have been growing at a record-low pace for the past three years, at about 3.9% a year. It is unclear whether the health law will bolster that trend, or undermine it by bringing more people into the system.
The federal analysts lowered their estimates for growth in the years 2015-2022, but still projected health spending to grow more quickly than inflation. They projected the spending per capita would grow about 5% a year between 2016 and 2018 and pick up to 6.5% by 2022, in part because of the continued enrollment of baby boomers in Medicare.
In 2022, health spending will be just over $5 trillion and 19.9% of the U.S. economy, up from 18% now, they predicted. Government programs will pay almost half, they said, up from almost 45% today.
Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com
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