The amount that America collectively spent on health care last year rose 3.6 percent from the previous year, to an average of $9,255 a person, federal health officials reported on Wednesday. That may not seem particularly newsworthy, but it's the fifth year in a row that health care spending has risen by less than 5 percent, closely matching the growth in GDP.
As Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services statistician Micah Hartman notes, 3.6 percent is also "the lowest increase on record in the national health expenditures going back to 1960." Taken with the previous decade, and the last four years in particular, this is "evidence that the American health care system may be changing in ways that could make it more affordable in the years to come," says The New York Times' Margot Sanger-Katz, who provides this helpful chart:
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