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The nation's health spending will bump up next year as the Affordable Care Act expands insurance coverage to more Americans, and then will grow by an average of 6.2 percent a year over the next decade, according to projections by government actuaries.

That estimate is lower than the typical annual increases before the recession hit. Still, the actuaries forecast that in a decade the health care segment of the nation's economy will be larger than it is today, amounting to a fifth of the gross domestic product in 2022.

They attributed that to the rising number of baby boomers moving into Medicare and the expectation that the economy will improve, according to a study published online in the journal Health Affairs.

The actuaries were not persuaded that cost-cutting experiments in the health law will have an impact. Neither were they convinced that new insurer procedures that change the way doctors, hospitals and others provide services will help. They assumed "modest" savings from those changes from the law.

"It's a little early to tell how substantial those savings will be in the longer term," Gigi Cuckler, an actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and lead author of the report, told reporters Wednesday.

Still, the Obama administration enthusiastically greeted the report. "We are on the right track to controlling health care costs, thanks in part to the Affordable Care Act," CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner said in a statement. "More Americans will have the ability to get the health care they need, and that is a good thing. We have identified several areas where our reforms to control costs are making progress and we must build on those efforts in the years ahead."

But not everyone agrees. "I think it's quite clear from the study that the notion that the health care law fundamentally bends costs is just totally unsupported by facts," James Capretta, a budget adviser to President George W. Bush, said in an interview. "Something more fundamental needs to be done to slow costs than what is in the health law."

Shots - Health News

The 'Hard To Change' Legacy Of Medicare Payments

The Federal Reserve said today that it is not slowing down its monthly purchase of $85 billion in bonds.

The program is intended to stimulate a sluggish economy and the Fed was widely expected to announce that in light of a recovering economy, it was tapering the bond-buying program. Instead, it delivered a surprise that caused the markets to jump, as the Dow and the S&P closed at record highs.

In a statement issued after a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed said it was awaiting more data on the health of the economy before making a decision on the stimulus program:

"Taking into account the extent of federal fiscal retrenchment, the Committee sees the improvement in economic activity and labor market conditions since it began its asset purchase program a year ago as consistent with growing underlying strength in the broader economy. However, the Committee decided to await more evidence that progress will be sustained before adjusting the pace of its purchases. Accordingly, the Committee decided to continue purchasing additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month and longer-term Treasury securities at a pace of $45 billion per month."

If you are trying to buy a home, you just got good news: The Federal Reserve said Wednesday it is not going to try to drive up long-term interest rates just yet.

Stock investors are happy for you. They like cheap mortgages too because a robust housing market creates jobs. To celebrate, they bought more shares, sending the Dow Jones industrial average up 147.21 to an all-time high of 15,676.94.

Unfortunately, if you are a retiree who wants a higher return on your savings in the bank — well, sorry. The interest paid to you will be meager.

In fact, the Fed's surprising announcement on interest rates created lots of winners and losers. But before sorting them out, let's first look at what happened:

Policymakers for the central bank met this week and concluded that the U.S. economy is still weak enough to need their help. They said they recognize that the country has seen "improvement in economic activity and labor market conditions," but they added that the Fed still has to tamp down interest rates as officials "await more evidence that progress will be sustained."

Their decision stunned most economists, who believed Fed officials were ready to switch gears away from the long-standing policy of restraining interest rates. The low-rate strategy has been in place throughout the Great Recession and slow recovery.

But many experts say it's time for a change. They think the economy is strong enough to allow interest rates to start to return to historical norms.

Back in June, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke himself suggested such a switch would come by year's end.

But since then, interest rates on mortgages have been ratcheting up on their own — in anticipation of the coming change. Ditto for interest rates on Treasury securities.

Then on Wednesday afternoon, Bernanke and his fellow policymakers sprang their surprise. After taking a harder look at the most recent information, they decided not to change course after all.

They are worried that congressional Republicans and the White House might have another big showdown this fall, which could rattle markets. And Fed officials don't like seeing the latest higher mortgage rates, which have been scaring off some potential homebuyers.

"The tightening of financial conditions observed in recent months, if sustained, could slow the pace of improvement in the economy and the labor market," the Fed officials said in a statement.

So for the time being, the Fed will not back off its strategy of buying $85 billion a month in bonds to push down on long-term interest rates. It could still taper those purchases by year's end if the policymakers think conditions have changed, but for now, the low-rate strategy is firmly in place.

As a result, these groups cheered the Fed announcement:

Homebuyers and sellers. Thirty-year fixed mortgage rates, which jumped from about 3.5 percent in April to around 4.5 percent recently, are more likely now to halt their upward march. That may prompt more people to get into the homebuying market.

Stock owners. Shares become more valuable when investors can't get much of a return from interest payments on insured securities. So stock prices shot to record highs as of Wednesday's close.

Gold owners. The price of gold surged more than 4 percent to about $1,360. The hike came because gold gets more attractive in times of economic uncertainty and inflation. Some people believe the Fed's current policies eventually will lead to inflation.

And these groups found little to celebrate:

Gas guzzlers. The price of oil — just like gold — rose on inflation fears. By late afternoon, U.S. crude had risen more than $3 per barrel to a high of $108.49.

Conservative savers. If you like to keep your money in very safe securities, your interest income will stay depressed. For example, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note plunged to 2.71 percent after the announcement, down from 2.90 percent.

Job seekers. Not that you needed anyone to tell you this, but the Fed said the economic outlook is not great. It sees growth of 2.3 percent at best this year, down from its earlier forecast of growth as strong as 2.6 percent.

It was a day when most in Congress were obsessed with an increasingly likely government shutdown that would be of lawmakers' own making. But not the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The GOP-controlled panel held a marathon six-hour hearing on what South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy called the most important issue of all to the folks back home: the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead just over a year ago.

Usually it's congressional Republicans who push for Benghazi hearings — some have predicted that when all the facts come out, if they ever do, the deadly episode could become the Obama administration's Waterloo. But it was in fact Democrats on the oversight panel who called for this particular hearing, four months ago. That's how long it's taken to get the two men who headed an official investigation of Benghazi — and whose report came out last December — to sit down in front of the committee to defend their findings.

Both career diplomat Thomas Pickering and retired Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were eager to expound publicly on their Benghazi probe. But Republicans on the panel, wary of what might spill out in public, insisted the two men first sit for four days of private interrogation. They forced Pickering to do so by serving him a subpoena.

Democrats used Thursday's hearing to knock down what they characterized as canards spread by Republicans and their media allies. Mullen assured them that there had been no order to stand down given to four U.S. Special Operations soldiers who wanted to travel from Tripoli to Benghazi once the attacks began on Sept. 11, 2012. He said there was no way U.S. warplanes could have been scrambled in time to protect the two U.S. sites in Benghazi that came under attack. Pickering said there was no need to interview Hillary Clinton for the investigation, since as secretary of state she did not have the operational responsibility that investigators were charged by Congress to probe.

Republicans called the official report on Benghazi a whitewash. In what Democrats saw as a bid to discredit their party's front-runner for the 2016 presidential sweepstakes, GOP committee members repeatedly pressed the two witnesses on why Clinton was not held responsible. Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz chided Mullen, who at the time of the attack was still chairman of the Joint Chiefs, for not requesting air support from NATO allies. "I actually commanded NATO forces," Mullen shot back, "and the likelihood that NATO could respond in a situation like that was absolutely zero."

Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., complained that the two investigators had access to State Department officials who had not been made available to his panel as witnesses. He announced he would issue subpoenas to summon them.

There were demands from other Republicans that eyewitnesses at the scenes of the attacks be made available to the committee for questioning. Left unsaid was that the Benghazi "special mission," as Pickering called it, has been widely reported to have been a CIA operation rather than a diplomatic post.

Not much that was new came to light at the hearing. But that was not the point. Democrats wanted their two highly respected witnesses to publicly counter the conservative drumbeat about a Benghazi cover-up. Republicans had one more chance to show constituents they're still on the case.

But there has been one big change since the standing-room-only Benghazi hearings held earlier this year. This time, except for the row behind the witnesses, most of the audience seats were empty. Not even Fox News bothered to carry the hearing live.

Benghazi may still be the most burning issue in Trey Gowdy's district. That clearly is no longer true in Washington.