The Seattle Times, a paper that leans (and sometimes lurches) to the right, has taken the odd stance of demanding that President Barack Obama's hard-won health-care bill be shelved in favor of a greater focus on job creation. Never mind that the health-care bill is in its final stages, and that it will be completed in the next several weeks and signed by the president shortly thereafter. The Times calls the piece, "Jobs first, then let's talk about health-care reform." But what follows reveals that the Times isn't concerned so much with priorities in Congress, but providing shelter from taxes, especially for small businesses.

But the Times' argument to delay health-care reform in favor of creating jobs is as odds with a study by Harvard and USC economists saying that "health-care legislation in Congress could slow the growth of medical costs, allowing employers to create 250,000 to 400,000 new jobs a year over the next decade." That's 2.5 million new jobs by 2020—just by reforming health care insurance.

It's admirable that the Times is sticking up for small business, but they do so at the expense of medium-size and larger companies, most of which are getting killed by double-digit health care cost increases—and will suffer more if we don't reform health insurance. Whats more, the window for Democrats to pass health-care reform is closing quickly. Retirements in the United States Senate are going to help the GOP whittle down the Dems' majority, making it impossible to prevent a filibuster of health-care reform later. No, it's clear that it's either health-care reform now, or health care reform never. The Times knows this. And calling to delay health care is actually a call to kill health care.