The Kansas City Star has a piece today on a sometimes-overlooked element of the congressional debate about health-care legislation: the timing.

Should a bill become law late this year or early next year, some of the key tax and spending provisions won’t go into effect until 2013 — which means, by the way, that highly unpopular future provisions might not survive a year or two of prospective public reaction (remember Dan Rostenkowski’s noisy little stroll down the street?) But that doesn’t mean that the legislation would have no immediate effects:

While the exact language isn’t known, experts expect the final measure to place new regulations on insurance companies almost immediately — while postponing for three years the requirement that everyone have insurance.
That’s a recipe, they say, for higher costs for you and your employer, perhaps as early as 2010.
“You aren’t going to have to throw everything out the window,” said Ed Haislmaier of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. “But there’s a lot that can be done prior to 2013 on the regulatory side that will have the effect of driving up costs.”
A lobbying group called America’s Health Insurance Plans made the same point in a letter to House members before the Nov. 7 approval of a health reform plan.
“These reforms would force the reopening of existing contracts and increase the cost of coverage for American families by promising new benefits that cannot be supported by current premium levels,” the lobbying group wrote.