The Web Briefing flags a Newsweek column by Ezra Klein titled, “How Health Care Reform Reduces the Deficit in Five Not-So-Easy Steps.” Let’s look at step one,* which, according to Klein, is “the bill’s first, and most important, step”:

The creation of regulated, subsidized health-insurance exchanges will force insurers to compete on price, driving premiums down. There’s an intuitive rebuttal to this point and an empirical one. Intuitively, insurers can only compete on price in this system if they have the power to negotiate lower reimbursement rates with doctors and hospitals. Nothing in this bill enhances their power to do that. The bill requires insurance companies to offer more comprehensive, subsidized insurance to more people, thereby increasing demand for medical care faster than supply can keep up. Doctors and hospitals will demand higher reimbursement rates as their workloads increase.

The empirical rebuttal is that the commonwealth of Massachusetts has had exactly this kind of health-insurance exchange since 2006. Its premiums are among the highest and fastest-growing in the country. Its insurers just raised premiums by another 10 percent.

Health-care costs are going to go up under this bill. You should bet on it — the market is.

* (“Cut a hole in a box…”)