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A few minutes ago President Obama got a question on health care reform, based on new projections that supposedly show it will fail to “bend the curve” on costs. But that’s not what the projections show. I was going to write a long post on this—and, sometime soon, maybe I will. But let me quickly go over this, because it’s understandably confusing but very important.

The projections, based on government estimates and published this week in Health Affairs, are an update of projections the government made earlier in the year, while Congress was in the final stages of debating the Affordable Care Act. And the basic storyline hasn’t really changed.

The Affordable Care Act has two basic components.

There are, first, provisions to cut the cost of care—like...