Some Savings, At Some Point

Time's Michael Scherer points out that, because there's no historical precedent for the kind of reforms Democrats are seeking to make in the U.S. health care system, there's no real way to predict how they'll change costs. No one knows how health care markets will react to these changes, because they've never happened before. Cost savings are one of the big selling points for health care reform, and all of President's fire and brimstone about the consequences of inaction has centered around escalating costs and the need to reverse the course. But as Scherer notes, Obama is without a hard number to augment his rhetoric of cost control as he tries to sell his plan to the American people--which makes the selling a bit harder.