Health care reform is mostly a good thing - probably

The UCLA Anderson Forecast's quarterly report includes an expansive look at health care reform, and while there's still a lot to play out the prognosis is generally positive. The school's economists expect little or no impact on the overall economy until the major tax hikes take effect in 2013 and the insurance exchanges begin operating in 2014. The betting is that by then the economy will be in much better shape. At that point taxes will modestly reduce growth while additional healthcare spending will stimulate it. As for costs:

The economist Herbert Stein had a famous maxim: “"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”" Healthcare costs cannot continue to grow forever at rates exceeding GDP, as we know from the most basic laws of feasibility and diminishing returns in economics. This enables us at the UCLA Anderson Forecast to make a very safe prediction: that they will not. One way or another, at some point in the future, this issue will be resolved. And in the meantime our worries about it provide additional stimulus to the healthcare sector in the form of augmented incomes for our therapists.

The report is not available online.