Surprise

From Jason Rosenbaum at Huffington Post, we learn that it did not take long for the insurers and health care providers to temper their enthusiasm for reducing costs.

Hospitals and insurance companies said Thursday that President Obama had substantially overstated their promise earlier this week to reduce the growth of health spending.

Perhaps they meant to say they were reducing the rate of growth by 1.5%, not the actual growth itself. So that if we assume the rate is 4% per annum, we can knock this down to 3.96% next year and over the course of maybe the next half-century or so, we can get this sucker under control.

And, just as an aside, what the hell is SEIU doing associating with these guys anyway?