Voters will get their first taste of the benefits of health care reform only a few short weeks before the November midterm elections.

They won’t have to swallow most of the bitter pills until much later — well after President Barack Obama faces voters again in 2012.

Match the effective dates of key reform provisions against the election calendar, and it becomes clear that Democrats were as focused on writing a legislative overhaul of the health care system as they were on devising a political road map for selling it to voters.

The landmark health legislation the president will sign into law Tuesday, and an accompanying package of fixes still moving through the Senate, go further than previous incarnations of the bill to front-load the gain and push back the pain.

“Clearly, there has been an effort to address an expectations gap,” said Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which conducted polling last year that found a gulf between what Americans expected to see immediately and what the bill would actually offer.

By providing immediate benefits, Democrats can inoculate themselves from the Republican push for repeal, he said.

“Once you give benefits of this kind of scope to the American people, they are not going to want to give them back,” Altman said.

The latest version delays by at least two years the taxes on the insurance and medical device industries, the cap on contributions to flexible savings accounts and the excise tax on so-called Cadillac insurance plans. In each case, the implementation dates shifted to at least 2013 or, in the case of the Cadillac tax, until 2018.

Another major tax increase — a boost in the Medicare payroll tax on investment income — doesn’t hit until 2013.

The one tax increase that goes into effect soon – in July - is a 10 percent levy on indoor tanning services, dubbed the "vanity tax."

The most ambitious efforts to expand coverage won’t begin immediately, either.

More than $400 billion in subsidies for lower-income Americans to purchase insurance won’t be available until 2014. The new insurance marketplaces known as exchanges also won’t be up and running until then. The same goes for a major expansion of Medicaid.

It takes time to build the governmental infrastructure to pull off a change of this size to the health care system.

But with that in mind, Democrats pushed hard over the past six months to move up as many reforms as possible — and the ones they chose also happen to be the most popular and the least costly.