Health Care

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/item/10-instant-effects-of-reform/what-now/

It addresses a bit of the problem with the employer-based health care model as a whole by encouraging small businesses to offer insurance while mitigating the cost to those businesses by offering a tax deduction, and mitigates the effect of the profit motive of large insurance companies on national health by taxing those companies whose administrative costs (read: executive compensation packages) exceed a certain percentage of their operating budget.

This is why health care goes hand in hand with financial reform and student loan reform. To avoid that latter provision about administrative costs having the unintended consequence of premiums actually rising as that tax gets passed onto consumers, executive pay needs to come down across the board so that lower compensation packages at insurance companies won't lead to a brain drain at the companies to whom we are entrusting the health of our nation. (I.e. That tax needs to be borne by the executives, not the consumers, but compensation should be competitive even if it includes a public service component.)

Student loan reform comes in as we need to mobilize our economy to pay for these reforms, given the good chance that despite OMB projections, health care reform may cause a net increase in the deficit (and almost certainly will over the short term). More students in college with less debt takes the long view of our economic health as a nation. That's assuming that the gov't can in fact make student loans better without the middle man, and I don't know what the projections are for the short term consequences to the banking sector.

Nevertheless, the economic picture for our country is not pretty over the short term no matter which way you paint it (and the banking sector has been resilient despite the creative destruction of some of its members), and this looks better than the status quo to me.