From our editorial today:

What do the signatories hope to get out of their deal with the president? They must know that the administration will now try to hold them accountable for something over which they have no control. The most likely answer is, simply, time. The industry feels vulnerable to government-imposed cost controls, but it will be difficult for Congress to impose any such limits this year now that there is a seemingly painless way to achieving the same savings. By the time it becomes clear that nothing real was ever done, “the industry” hopes the political dynamics will have changed more to their advantage. One very likely outcome is that the insurance industry will be rewarded for its fealty with a federal mandate that all Americans buy their products under a national-health program whose rules will be written in no small part by insurance-industry lobbyists.
All of this might be dismissed as just typical Washingtonian opera if the subject matter were less important. The unavoidable fact is that health-care costs do threaten the financial stability of the government, given the current structure of our entitlement programs. Spending on Medicare and Medicaid is expected to rise from about 4.3 percent of GDP today to 8 percent in 2030. The Obama administration and Congress are racing to pass a health-care bill with permanent and certain long-term spending commitments, with only the most speculative notions of cost-cutting. Refusal to deal realistically with health-care costs is why we have a long-term fiscal problem in the first place, and it is a roadmap to ruin.

Read more here.