“Rep. Jim Matheson (Utah) on Wednesday became the first Democrat to publicly support repealing the healthcare reform law’s CLASS program since the administration announced it was indefinitely suspending the program. Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.) previous had sponsored legislation with two Republicans in March that would repeal the program. “
“Had it not been for CLASS, health care reform would have been scored as a net budget positive in the first five years of the ten-year window and a net negative in the later five years – that is, when it was fully in effect. The Orszag-DeParle claim of a positive long-term impact would have hinged entirely upon unquantifiable savings claims in the second decade and beyond, and on a thin $8 billion (1% of the bill’s 10-yr cost) plus in 2019 alone — after a net minus in each of 2016-2018..”
“CLASS’s enactment was no accident of a chaotic and uncontrolled legislative process. It was a deliberate and cynical ploy to put a phony veneer of fiscal restraint on top of a massive tax-and-spend program. The administration and its allies certainly knew all along that a day of reckoning would come. But they didn’t care; they staked so much on the passage of Obamacare that they had a win-at-any-cost mentality. And now that they have admitted that tens of billions of dollars in deficit reduction that they promised will never materialize, they aren’t the least bit apologetic.”
“So what goes around, comes around. ObamaCare is in law — with all of its trillion-dollar spending and taxes now part of CBO’s ‘baseline’ budget projections. Reconciliation was created for the express purpose of giving Congress an expedited process for making changes to just this kind of spending and tax policy. Obamacare is thus a very ripe target for budget cutting, and that means reconciliation.”
“The Obama administration is giving up on a controversial piece of the healthcare reform law.
Officials from the Health and Human Services Department said Friday they will not keep trying to implement the CLASS program, which had long faced criticism from Republicans and skepticism within HHS.
‘We won’t be working further to implement the CLASS Act … We don’t see a path forward to be able to do that,’ Assistant Secretary for Aging Kathy Greenlee told reporters.”
“Malcolm Muggeridge once said, ‘People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.’ It was in this spirit that Democrats wanted to believe in Obamacare. The CLASS Act is the first, but surely not the last, rude collision between their wishfulness and reality.”
“The Obama administration Friday pulled the plug on a major program in the president’s signature health overhaul law – a long-term care insurance plan dogged from the beginning by doubts over its financial solvency. Targeted by congressional Republicans for repeal, the program became the first casualty in the political and policy wars over the health care law. It had been expected to launch in 2013.”
“There is growing concern that the substantial infrastructure necessary for successful implementation of the
PPACA’s primary provisions will not be ready by 2014. Moreover, there are serious legal challenges to the law still
pending. Finally, significant political disagreements exist over the merits of many PPACA provisions; these are likely
to be debated extensively in the 2012 election season. Consequently, there is growing interest in delaying further implementation of the law until the operational, legal, and political concerns can be settled. In this short note, we explore the budgetary implications of delaying the implementation of the PPACA for 2, 3, and 4 years.”
“The Obama health-care plan passed 18 months ago, and its cynicism still manages to astonish. Witness the spectacle surrounding one of its flagship new entitlements, which is eliciting some remarkable concessions from its drafters. The Health and Human Services Department recently shut down a government insurance program for long-term care, known by the acronym Class. HHS also released a statement claiming that reports that HHS is shutting down Class are ‘not accurate.’ All HHS did was suspend Class policy planning, told Senate Democrats to zero out Class funding for 2012, reassigned Class’s career staffers to other projects and pink-slipped the program’s chief actuary. Other than that, it’s full-speed ahead.”
“Jim Capretta, Andrew Stiles, and others have written in these pages about the looming fiscal disaster that is CLASS, Obamacare’s long-term care entitlement. This morning, CLASS’s chief actuary — the official in charge of designing the program’s structure — sent out an e-mail stating that ‘HHS has decided to close down the CLASS Office effective tomorrow.’ The actuary went on to tell National Journal that ‘all of the people [in the CLASS office] are being reassigned.'”