Congress is back in session for what figures to be a frantic month of July. As the House and Senate gear up for a packed schedule of health reform hearings and mark-ups to meet a self-imposed August deadline, the White House has been working very hard to line up support outside the halls of Congress and keep the process moving.

First, there was the much-reported stakeholders' letter to the White House pledging to help slow health care spending by some $2 trillion over 10 years. Then, there was the $80 billion agreement with PhRMA—endorsed by the AARP—to lower costs of prescription drugs and help pay for reform. Just last week, the nation's largest employer, Wal-Mart, in a letter to the president also signed by SEIU and the Center for American Progress, stated that it was open to an employer mandate as part of the shared responsiblity it and other businesses bore for health reform.

Next up—hospitals.

Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown and Chris Frates report that the White House and Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) are a near a deal with three hospital associations to provide more than $150 billion in savings, over 10 years, for health reform. The savings would come primarily from reductions in current Medicare and Medicaid spending. The key question for the American Hospital Association, the Catholic Health Association, and the Federation of American Hospitals is how quickly such changes would be phased in. Also contentious is the president's proposal to expand the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission's authority to make payment policy decisions. (Now MedPAC makes nonbinding recommendations.) The details are expected to be released later this week, although the timing is tricky with Obama currently traveling abroad.

With Congress ready to dive into health reform weeds that can seem sicker than our backyard (a push mower, it turns out, is an even less effective tool for moving your priorities than reconciliation), agreements like these are important. They illustrate the magnitude of savings that are really possible from health reform. Perhaps even more important, they demonstrate that while we may disagree on a certain provision or component of reform, there's a great deal of consensus on what reform can and should accomplish. And with every stakeholder discussion, town hall, good faith ad campaign, op-ed and public letter supporting reform, however broady defined, that consensus gets harder to break.