Well, Nancy Pelosi did say that we’d have to pass ObamaCare to find out what’s in it, since Congress wasn’t too interested in letting us read the bill first.  The New York Times didn’t show much curiosity until after the passage as well.  Yesterday, the newspaper finally got around to reporting all of the interesting little tidbits that the bill contains, including a federal mandate on breastfeeding and a new tanning tax:

Tucked inside the huge health reform bill signed into law last week were many surprising and little-noticed provisions that will affect consumers in ways large and small.

“Little-noticed?”  Bear in mind that this comes from The Paper of Record, which supposedly publishes All The News That’s Fit to Print.  If these are “little noticed,” it’s because media outlets like the Times didn’t do their job.

It emerged that chain restaurants, for example, would have to disclose the calorie counts of items on their menus. Who knew?

Er, Democrats knew.  We didn’t know, mainly because the Times busied itself with trying to sell ObamaCare rather than report on it, and because Democrats didn’t want us to know.

So what are these “surprising and little-noticed provisions”?

• A new federal mandate on businesses of 51 or more employees to provide a private area (not a bathroom) for nursing mothers to pump breast milk for up to a year after giving birth.  This means that businesses have to plan for mainly unused floor space in every facility, or face federal sanctions.
• Tanning salons now have to charge a 10% excise tax on their services.  That should help the local economies!
• W-2s must now declare “informationally” the value of health-care benefits.  This means that W-2s will become even more complicated and will cost businesses billions each year in extra accounting and reporting, which will hit smaller businesses most.

Not only will these new mandates carry extra cost burdens for businesses, we now will have to fund enforcement as well.  That means even more money taken out of the private sector and spent on non-productive regulatory efforts, mainly for the Democrats’ ideas of social engineering. Too bad the major media outlets didn’t take notice of these while something could have been done about them … which was the reason why outlets like the Times ignored them.