One of the most painfully counterproductive provisions of ObamaCare socialized medicine is the penalty it imposes on companies when they exceed 50 full-time employees.

Consider this hypothetical.

Suppose you own a small business with 40 employees. You pay them reasonable salaries for the work they perform, but tight budgets prevent you from being able to provide them health insurance, too.

Under ObamaCare, if your business expands and you pass the 50-employee mark, you must start to offer health insurance approved by the federal government. If you do not offer that coverage, you must pay an annual fine of $2,000 for every full-time worker you employ -- excluding your first 30 employees.

So if you want to hire, say, 20 employees -- raising your total number of workers from 40 to 60 -- you will either have to start offering health benefits that you may not be able to afford, or you will have to pay fines totaling $60,000 per year!

For a small business operating on limited finances to begin with, that's a massive new tax.

What will the result be? Many small businesses will "do the math" and discover that with all the costs and penalties imposed by ObamaCare, it's just not worth it to expand to 50 or more employees. That means they will not be hiring the new workers they might otherwise have employed.

In effect, ObamaCare will put the brakes on untold numbers of small businesses that would like to get bigger and contribute to our country's economic growth.

President Barack Obama has said again and again that we need more jobs -- and we do. But the policies he supports are going to have the opposite effect.

It's not so much that he and Congress need to "do something" to create jobs. They need to "stop doing things" that prevent job creation.