“The Obama administration is closing down the office charged with putting in place one of the most controversial provisions of the healthcare reform law, the long-term care program’s actuary writes in an email obtained by The Hill…
The actuary in charge of implementing the long-term care program for people with disabilities, the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act, sent an email to colleagues Thursday informing them that HHS is closing down his office on Friday.”
“And now, today, a new Congressional investigation led by John Thune reveals that the Obama Administration knew all along that CLASS was unsustainable. ‘As a result of this investigation,’ the authors write, ‘it is now clear that some officials inside HHS warned for months before passage that the CLASS program would be a fiscal disaster. Within HHS the program was repeatedly referred to as “a recipe for disaster” with “terminal problems.”‘”
“Even as leading Democrats offered assurances to the contrary, government experts repeatedly warned that a new long-term care insurance plan could go belly up, saddling taxpayers with another underfunded benefit program, according to emails disclosed by congressional investigators. Part of President Barack Obama’s health care law, the program is in limbo as a congressional debt panel searches for budget savings and behind the scenes, administration officials scramble to find a viable financing formula.”
“Liberals in Congress were aware of these problems and continued to push for CLASS’s inclusion in Obamacare. That suggests that they either had an ideological commitment to a long term care entitlement program that overrode any concerns about its actuarial soundness, or that they were determined to include the program as a means to game the bill’s budget score. Since premium contributions into the CLASS program are front-loaded, its inclusion in the health care bill meant that it would reduce the budget deficit over 10 years (the standard CBO measurement window). But as the program begins to pay out benefits, its budget will sink into the red.”
“Here’s one more nauseating outcome of that mentality: The Affordable Health Care and Reform Act includes a provision to subsidize coverage for early retirees in the public and private sector who quit working but aren’t old enough to qualify for Medicare… Who could have seen that coming? You offer a pile of free (i.e. taxpayer!) money for public and private companies and their workers to cash out – and they do! So who’s snagging the benefit so far?”
“Now, there’s a new study that suggests that employer dumping under Obamacare could be significant, leading to an explosion of the law’s costs and thereby the federal debt. A working paper by economists Richard Burkhauser and Sean Lyons of Cornell and Kosali Simon of Indiana, published by the National Bureau for Economic Research, examined various reasonable assumptions regarding the behavior of employers under the law.”
“State legislators are concerned that a new program in the healthcare reform law will reopen a series of problems that states tackled years ago. The National Conference of Insurance Legislators is worried about the law’s new long-term-care insurance program, known as CLASS.”
“Federal payments required by President Barack Obama’s health care law are being understated by as much as $50 billion per year because official budget forecasts ignore the cost of insuring many employees’ spouses and children, according to a new analysis. The result could cost the U.S. Treasury hundreds of billions of dollars during the first ten years of the new health care law’s implementation.”
“The Budget Control Act of 2011 ties increases in the federal debt limit to cuts in spending on a dollar-for-dollar basis. In a deal described by one opponent as a ‘sugar-coated Satan sandwich,’ President Obama agreed that Medicare should be put on the chopping block along with other federal programs. That could prove to be the thread that unravels the massive expansion of health spending created in last year’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”
“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is soliciting bids to promote the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) program, a controversial long-term care insurance program established by ObamaCare.
Two contracts are up for grabs: one to create a ‘strategic brand’ for CLASS, the other to develop a CLASS ‘awareness campaign.’ The kicker: The CLASS program has yet to be created, and there is considerable doubt that it ever will be.”