Breaking news: Senate repeals one of the health care act's more onerous provisions

We've all gotten 1099s. They're the reports that companies issue to freelancers and people who provide services outside the bounds of normal employment.

For more than a decade, I've managed the financials for the small Internet business my husband and I own. Filing 1099s is annoying, but nothing overwhelming in the overall tax-reporting scheme of things.

However, the new health care act changed all that. As a way to make sure more reporting on income was done -- ostensibly to make sure taxes were paid where they might have otherwise fallen through the cracks, a new 1099 reporting process was put into place.

Had it gone live, it would have been a bookkeeping nightmare.

The idea was that companies would have had to report to the IRS every transaction that was valued at more than $600 and, presumably, file separate 1099s for every vendor. As you might imagine, this could have been insane, especially for those companies in the tech sector.

Fortunately -- in a victory for bipartisan team-playing -- the Democratically controlled Senate has overturned this provision. The Republican-controlled House overturned it earlier in the month.

President Obama has indicated he'll sign this, so it looks like we won't be spending all our time filling out 1099s every time we buy an iPad or a file cabinet.

There are a lot of useful aspects to the new health care act and it's good to see that at least one element that made it problematic for most American businesses is being corrected. There's more to correct, and hopefully, over time, we'll have functional, comprehensive health care reform.