Health spending to get bigger share of U.S. economy

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. health spending will grow faster than the overall economy this decade and by 2019 nearly 20 cents of every dollar spent in the United States will go for healthcare, U.S. government analysts said on Thursday.

Economists at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as CMS, said in a new report that the national healthcare spending will grow an average 6.1 percent a year over the decade to $4.5 trillion in 2019, about 1.7 percent faster than the overall economy. Healthcare will account for 19.3 percent of the economy in 2019, the report said.