Sometimes, I think the Wonk Room was made just for me. I mean, look at all these health care graphs. Tons of them! Some of them you've seen before, but this image, tracking Medicare costs against private health insurance, is particularly useful given recent conversations around entitlement cuts and fiscal responsibility:
As you can see, they tend to rise and fall together. But focus in on the late-90s. It's one of the few periods in which public health expenditures outpace private health expenditures. The story there is that the managed care revolution created incredible savings in the private health insurance market. That fizzled fairly quickly. But this period is also when a lot of the "entitlement crisis" fear-mongering began. At the same time, the projections being used for Social Security were actually looking worse due to the models used for estimation. So it really did look like "entitlements" as a class might be in uniquely bad shape -- private health spending seemed controlled and both Social Security and Medicare were in trouble. But in the period since, Social Security has come to look quite strong and Medicare and private insurance costs have both grown almost comically unsustainable.
As you can see, they tend to rise and fall together. But focus in on the late-90s. It's one of the few periods in which public health expenditures outpace private health expenditures. The story there is that the managed care revolution created incredible savings in the private health insurance market. That fizzled fairly quickly. But this period is also when a lot of the "entitlement crisis" fear-mongering began. At the same time, the projections being used for Social Security were actually looking worse due to the models used for estimation. So it really did look like "entitlements" as a class might be in uniquely bad shape -- private health spending seemed controlled and both Social Security and Medicare were in trouble. But in the period since, Social Security has come to look quite strong and Medicare and private insurance costs have both grown almost comically unsustainable. 
