Trump's Gamble on Health-Care Costs

Lost in the debate over how best to insure Americans against the high cost of health care has been the question of how to bring that cost down. That's a shame, because keeping the cost of medical treatment from rising so fast is just as important as providing Americans access to it.

Promising efforts to get a grip on medical costs have lately run into resistance from the Trump administration. The federal agency in charge of Medicare is moving to curtail new requirements that hospitals "bundle" medical charges for hip and knee replacements, rather than assess separate fees for each appointment. Efforts to arrange similar lump-sum payments for other procedures are to be stopped altogether.