A quick summary of what's wrong with the new health care reform law

Well, the President just signed the bill. It's not going to be repealed as long as Obama is in office, so the only reasonable step is to seek changes that will make it less damaging than it already is.

I think the Wall Street Journal put it well today when they said that if the objective was to cover the uninsured, it could have been done with a small federal program that provided a basic low cost insurance policy. Instead, we have this monster of a law that does next to nothing to bring costs under control but still raises taxes and sucks money out of the private productive economy.

Here's some more specific analysis regarding small businesses:

* Small business health premiums will continue to increase sharply, as even the Congressional Budget Office has determined.
* The legislation does nothing to encourage cost-conscious consumer behavior, aside from the unnecessarily blunt “Cadillac tax,” which will not begin to have an effect until at least 2018, and which is insufficiently transparent and imposes unintended administrative burdens on small businesses.
* The delivery system reforms are positive, but are too back-loaded, giving powerful vested interests years to water them down or remove them entirely. Even if implemented, they are not likely to have a significant effect on costs for a decade or more. Malpractice reform, absent from the current legislation, would make these reforms much more effective.
* Though currently excluding most small companies, the large increases in “free-rider fees” are troubling. If there was once a distinction between an employer mandate and a free-rider provision, it seems to have been lost.
* The very large tax increases on both earned and unearned income could have a significant effect on many small business owners and their ability to reinvest in their companies’ growth. These increases are in addition to the administration’s current budget proposal which calls for significant income tax increases on the same individuals. Together, these taxes will create a steep increase in marginal tax rates on the very entrepreneurs we need to be investing and creating jobs.

I'm sure more sordid details will come to light in coming months as we find out about the sweetheart deals that were cut for individual Congressmen to get their votes.