WASHINGTON -- Total U.S. health care spending grew by more than 5 percent for the first time since 2007 last year, but a return to massive growth isn't on the horizon, according to federal estimates issued Tuesday.

National health expenditures -- a tally of all the money spent on health care by the government, businesses and households -- grew 5.5 percent to $3.08 trillion in 2014, the Office of the Actuary, an independent auditor within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, reported in the journal Health Affairs . That represents 17.7 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, an increase from 17.4 percent in 2013.

These latest estimates indicate that 2014 marked the end of a six-year period during which U.S. health care spending increased at historically low rates, largely driven by the Great Recession and sluggish recovery, but also influenced by aspects of the Affordable Care Act and signs of greater efficiency in the health care industry. The millions of people who gained health coverage as a result of Obamacare are a major reason spending rose faster last year, as was the introduction of $1,000-a-pill prescription drugs and an improved economy that led people to spend more on health care.

From 2008 through 2013, health care spending rose an average of 4 percent a year . Although those years of sub-5 percent growth may be over, the United States isn't entering a new era of huge, even double-digit, year-over-year spending increases like those seen from the 1990s through the mid-2000s, the report shows.

The federal actuaries project U.S. health care spending will rise an average of 5.8 percent per year from 2014 to 2024, when it will reach $5.43 trillion, or 19.6 percent of the entire economy. The average annual spending growth was 7.3 percent from 1990 through 2007.

"Although this health spending of 6 percent is faster than what we've seen around the period in the recession, it's still substantially slower than that experienced over the last three decades prior to the recession," Gigi Cuckler, an economist at the Office of the Actuary, said at a briefing with reporters Tuesday.