WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress designed the Affordable Care Act to spend a lot of money to give more people health insurance so they could access medical care. The law seems to have succeeded on all three counts, and the results are showing up on America's national health care tab.

The government, businesses and households spent $3 trillion on health care last year, an increase of 5.3 percent from 2013, according to a report published Wednesday by the Office of the Actuary, an independent agency housed within the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That amounted to $9,523 per person, and health care accounted for 17.5 percent of gross domestic product in 2014, up from 17.3 percent the year before.

That's the biggest percentage increase in national health expenditures since 2007, after five consecutive years of unusually slow growth that averaged less than 4 percent annually, and the millions who gained health coverage through Obamacare are the primary reason why. In other words, the auditors found, 8.7 million fewer people were uninsured last year, and the newly covered used their benefits to visit doctors, hospitals and pharmacies.

The other major factor driving higher spending was cutting-edge prescription drugs for diseases like Hepatitis C, cancer and multiple sclerosis, which can cost as much as $1,000 a pill and are increasing expenses for private health insurers and government programs. Between those high charges, price increases for other medicines and more people with health coverage, spending on prescriptions rose 12.2 percent last year, the biggest annual jump in a dozen years.

"The whole point of giving people insurance is so they have better access to health care, so it shouldn't be a surprise that health care spending went up a bit as more people got insured," said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. "Most of the health care system is growing very slowly, the exception being prescription drugs."