When the health care "reform" bill — aka "ObamaCare" — was being debated in Congress, one of the (many) criticisms of it was the sheer size and complexity of the legislation.  The bill weighed in at over 2000 pages, and was filled with taxes, bureaucracies, mandates, prohibitions, regulations, and definitions to the point that no one — even its supporters — knew exactly what was in the bill.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's famous response was that "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy".  Now that the "fog" is clearing, the hits just keep on coming — hits to the wallets of taxpayers, to the liberties of citizens, and to the bottom lines of employers.

The latest, courtesy of the Associated Press [emphases added]:

Tucked into the nation's massive new health care law is a requirement that could become a paperwork nightmare for nearly 40 million businesses.

The rule: They must file tax forms for every vendor that sells them more than $600 in goods.

Thegoal is to prevent vendors from underreporting their income to theInternal Revenue Service. The government must think vendors are omittinga lot, because the filing requirement is estimated to bring in $19billion over the next decade.

...Businesses already must file Form 1099s with the IRS when they purchasemore than $600 in services from a vendor in a year. The new provisionwould extend the requirement to the purchase of goods, starting in 2012.

The requirement would hit about 38 million businesses, charities andtax-exempt organizations, many of them small businesses already swampedby government paperwork, according to a recent report by the NationalTaxpayer Advocate. It would also create an avalanche of paperwork thatcould strain the IRS itself, wrote the advocate, an independent watchdogwithin the IRS.

Keeping in mind that the health care "reform" passed without a single Republican vote in either the House or Senate, the following sounds amazingly Orwellian:

For their part, Democrats blamed Republicans for Friday's failure to eliminate the provision.

"Despite all of their rhetoric about the need to eliminate this reporting requirement, Republicans walked away from small businesses when it mattered most," said Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.

The reason?  Democrats proposed raising taxes on corporations and gifts to "pay for" removing the requirement.

The platform for the advocates of government-centric health insurance "reform" is this:  put higher taxes and more paperwork requirements on employers — the businesses that create jobs and economic growth.  It's little wonder that in spite of spending hundreds of billions on bailouts and "stimulus", even during the Administration-proclaimed "Summer of Recovery ", Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner still expects the unemployment rate — already around 10% — to continue to remain high and possibly to rise.

Expect more onerous discoveries as the "fog of controversy" continues to clear away, and the "Summer of Recovery" becomes a November of discontent.