Many economists and media personalities like to fret about the state of the U.S. economy and national debt, but New Mexico State University economist Lowell Catlett said Americans have, and will continue to have, plenty of money to spend on their healthcare.

The average American devotes 42% of their income to food, housing and utilities. In Japan, the same figure is 62%, and in Europe, it's 68%. Globally, it's 98%, he said.

“It's 42% here, the lowest it has ever been in history,” Catlett said, at times gripping his forehead and running his fingers through his white hair, illustrating the comment he opened his lecture with about his mother once telling him he'd been “weird as hell” since he was born.

Catlett, who delivered the annual Gintzig Commemorative Lecture during the third day of the American College of Healthcare Executives' annual Congress on Healthcare Leadership in Chicago, talked about why he thinks healthcare will dominate the economy in the 21st century.

As one example, he talked about how his aging mother recently told him she was getting elective knee-replacement surgery. “What would we have told her 20 years ago? You're just getting old,” he said. Today? “An 82-year-old great-grandmother gets two new knees so she can play hacky-sack with her great-grandson.”

He also urged American entrepreneurs to catch on to a business model he'd heard about in Australia: a farmer who also runs a winery and an artisanal cheesemaking operation on his land is building an “old folks' home” so retired men and women can sit on the porch and watch sunsets and have fine cheese and wine rather than spending their days in “semiprivate” nursing home rooms.

“Build them,” he told the hundreds of healthcare executives in the audience. “We'll come.”