Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Enrollee Sakoun Khanthanoua reads a Maryland Health Connection health insurance... Read More

Enrollee Sakoun Khanthanoua reads a Maryland Health Connection health insurance marketplace pamphlet while waiting to speak to a health navigator at an education and enrollment event in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Dec. 7, 2013. Close

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Enrollee Sakoun Khanthanoua reads a Maryland Health Connection health insurance marketplace pamphlet while waiting to speak to a health navigator at an education and enrollment event in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Dec. 7, 2013.

The U.S. recession remained a drag on health-care spending three years after it ended as a net of 9.4 million people lost private insurance coverage before key provisions of Obamacare had begun, a government report showed.

Spending on hospitals, doctors, drugs and other health-care services rose 3.7 percent to $2.8 trillion in 2012, or about 17.2 percent of gross domestic product, actuaries at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in a report published yesterday in the journal Health Affairs. Growth was 6.3 percent at the end of 2007, when the U.S. entered an 18-month recession.

The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Acts largest health-care expansions didnt begin until this year, including private insurance for about 2.1 million new people and expanded Medicaid coverage for others. CMS actuaries have said spending should jump by 6.1 percent in 2014 as a result.

Expanded coverage is going to cause spending to go up, Charles Roehrig, the director of the Altarum Institutes Center for Sustainable Health Spending in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which studies cost growth, said in a phone interview.

Prescription drugs and nursing home costs had led the slowdown. Blockbuster drugs including Pfizer Inc. (PFE)s Lipitor, Sanofis Plavix and Merck & Co.s Singulair lost patent protection in late 2011 and 2012, causing retail prescription prices to increase 0.4 percent in 2012, the actuaries said.

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Obamacare Tested by Recession’s Effect on Health Care