But most experts I know are betting against that. For some time, they have expected health care costs to rise, because the primary factor in the slowdown was the economy. When unemployment is high and wages aren’t rising, you are less likely to consume more health care for the same reason that you are less likely to consume other goods—it costs money you might not have. You can’t avoid treatment for a heart attack, obviously. But the pills you take for a chronic condition? Getting somebody to look at a nagging, but tolerable pain? You might push that off until you had a little more cushion to pay for the co-pays and deductibles. That’s what people did during the recession. And now that the recession is over, they’re almost certainly starting to spend more again, partly to take care of those problems that they allowed to linger.

In fact, exactly one year ago Monday, an op-ed in the Washington Post predicted that health care spending would start rising about now. The op-ed was from Drew Altman and Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Foundation, based on work they and their colleagues had done with the analysts at Altarum. Historically, they noted, health care spending followed economic growth, albeit with a time lag. So pretty soon after the economy picked up again, people would start spending more money on health care—until it was rising at about 7 percent rather than 4 percent. Sure enough, according to the latest Altarum analysis, annual growth in health care spending as of February was 6.7 percent. That would be the highest rate since late 2007, just before the recession started.

But the recession wasn't the only reason health care spending stopped rising so quickly, which means there's reason to think the long-term trajectory on medical spending really has come down—at least a little. The whole health care industry is in the midst of some pretty significant transformations right now. One of them is a change in the design of health plans, which are transferring more and more out-of-pocket costs onto individuals. That change has tended to slow down health care spending for the same reason that the recession did: It makes people more cost-conscious, because every bill is another direct hit on their wallets. Conservatives and economists tend to think this is a good thing, because it gives people “more skin in the game.” Liberals and public health experts tend to think this is a bad thing, because it gives people incentive not to get medical care they might need. Either way, it’s been happening.

Another change is one taking place in the places where people get medical care, particularly hospitals. It’s a vast re-engineering project, one that attempts simultaneously to make systems run more smoothly and to pay closer attention to the issues that make people sick (or, at least, prevent them from getting better). One sign of this progress is a dramatic drop in hospital “readmissions” across the country—that is, patients going back to the hospital shortly after discharge, for the same reason they were admitted previously. (See the graph below.) This is no accident. It’s a product of “transitional care” programs that hospitals like Mount Sinai in New York started a few years ago. Basically, the hospitals identify which patients are at high risk for readmission, educate them while they are still in hospital, and then provide follow-up outpatient care once the patients have left.