The new issue of Health Affairs tackles the topic that should be on every American’s mind: health care costs. Figuring this out is the moral imperative of our time, but anyone who has an easy pat answer is someone who is not paying attention.

As editor Susan Dentzer puts it:

A MODERN TWIST on Greek myth would feature not Sisyphus, but a health policy-maker condemned to an eternal punishment of trying to tame health care costs. During rare work breaks from rolling the rock up the mountain, she’d read the report of the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care, formed in 1927 and chaired by a member of President Hoover’s cabinet.

As Daniel Fox described in the Milbank Memorial Fund’s Centennial Report, the committee tackled what it termed “‘the one great outstanding question before the medical profession’: how to deliver adequate medical services to all Americans at a reasonable cost.” Then, at her next work break, our suffering policymaker would watch President Obama on television, vowing that “the [health care reform] bill I sign must reflect my commitment…to slow the growth of health care costs over the long run.”