Author Topic: Obama now against repeal of CLASS Act - LMFAO! ! ! ! Can't make this Up!!!!  (Read 358 times)

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Obama against repeal of CLASS ACT (LMAO!)
The Hill ^ | 10/17/2011 | Julian Pecquet




President Obama is against repealing the health law's long-term care CLASS Act and might veto Republican efforts to do so, an administration official tells The Hill, despite the government's announcement Friday that the program was dead in the water.

"We do not support repeal," the official said Monday. "Repealing the CLASS Act isn't necessary or productive. What we should be doing is working together to address the long-term care challenges we face in this country."

Over the weekend, The Hill has learned, an administration official called CLASS Act advocates to reassure them that Obama is still committed to making the program work. That official also told advocates that widespread media reports on the program's demise were wrong, leaving advocates scratching their heads.


(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...


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Holy shit is Obama dumber than dirt.   

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 :D

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Obamacare is a Liberal Soup Made of Stone
Townhall.com ^ | October 24, 2011 | Bob Beauprez




The Obama Administration pulled the plug on one of the key provisions of their health care takeover legislation.

The Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) program, a new entitlement for long-term care that was long a dream of Ted Kennedy, was officially nixed by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius last week.

"Despite our best analytical efforts, I do not see a viable path forward for CLASS implementation at this time," she wrote in a letter to Congressional leaders.

Thankfully, the legislation required that before implementation of CLASS, the Administration was required to certify that the program would be financially solvent for 75 years.

After 19 months of trying to pull a rabbit out of the hat, Sebelius had to admit what critics had been saying all along – it was unsustainable.

The shell game accounting that was employed in March 2010 by the White House and Democrats in Congress to pretend that ObamaCare would actually reduce the federal deficit was embarrassingly transparent.

So, an admission that even the "best analytical efforts" by the administration – (read: cooking the books) - couldn't feign fiscal sustainability, speaks to the house of cards upon which ObamaCare is built.

One of the accounting gimmicks used to originally sell ObamaCare directly related to CLASS. The tax to support the program began immediately, but benefit payments were delayed for years.


That convenient trickery was projected to generate a pool of $70 billion the Democrats offered as evidence of deficit reduction. Of course, once benefits of the program started to be paid out, the $70 billion rapidly vanished and the program was, and would forever remain, in the red.

That is the reality that Sebelius finally had to recognize.

As the Wall Street Journal reported: "Now that one of ObamaCare's major new benefit programs has been scrapped, liberals are trying to make stone soup by claiming that the Obama Administration merely committed an act of 'good government.' They claim that when this long-term care insurance program proved to be unworkable, the Administration conceded as much, and now it's gone."

If only we could do the same thing to the rest of it as an "act of good government."

CLASS is the second provision of ObamaCare to bite the dust. Last April, with broad bi-partisan support Congress repealed the onerous business expense reporting requirement of the legislation. That these two parts of the legislation are gone is "Good News."

But, there remains a couple thousand pages still left to go.


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Is ObamaCare Meant to Be Fiscally Irresponsible?
By Michael Cannon




The Obama administration has officially scrapped one of the two entitlement programs Congress created under Obamacare. The failure of the "CLASS Act" shows how the rest of that law threatens every American's private health insurance.

The idea behind CLASS was that the government would run a voluntary and self-sustaining insurance plan to help the disabled pay for long-term care, including nursing home care. It was doomed to fail, thanks to a special kind of government price control Congress imposed on the premiums.

Congress required CLASS to set each applicant's premiums according to the average applicant's risk of needing such long-term care, rather than her individual risk. But averaged premiums are only attractive to people with above-average risks. Since few people with below-average risks would enroll, the average premium would rise. That would encourage more people with below-average risks not to enroll, and the vicious cycle would continue until the program collapsed.

As it turns out, CLASS collapsed even before its 2012 start date. The same thing happened when Obamacare imposed the same sort of price controls on health insurance for children in September 2010: the markets for child-only coverage collapsed in a total of 17 states, and are slowly collapsing in even more.

Everyone with a rudimentary understanding of insurance saw this coming. The government's non-partisan actuaries warned of "a very serious risk" that CLASS would be "unsustainable." One wrote, "Thirty-six years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order and require significant federal subsidies to continue."

The Democratic chairman of the Senate Budget Committee called CLASS "a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of." An Obama administration official wrote, "Seems like a disaster to me." One of President Obama's own cabinet secretaries called the program "totally unsustainable" and echoed a presidential commission on fiscal responsibility by recommending it be "reformed or repealed."

In the face of this setback, Obamacare supporters are naturally declaring victory. Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic sees "vindication." Kevin Drum of Mother Jones proudly announces, "What happened here is that government worked exactly the way it ought to." The Washington Post's Ezra Klein instructs, "The CLASS experience should, if anything, make us more confident in the underlying law." It's hard to argue with such logic, but let's try.

Cohn agrees with government actuaries that voluntary, self-sustaining insurance plans "face a significant risk of failure" when government imposes these price controls. Yet he claims the CLASS Act's failure "strengthens the case" for the rest of the law because when Obamacare imposes those price controls on everyone's health insurance in 2014, it will also force low-risk people to buy that overpriced health insurance. It is a virtue, he argues, that Obamacare forces people to take what they consider a bad deal.

The law also tries to prevent the market from unraveling by using roughly half a trillion dollars of new tax revenue to subsidize people's premiums. It is a virtue, say supporters, that Obamacare raises taxes (amid high unemployment, no less) to encourage people to buy something they would not voluntarily purchase with their own money.

Obamacare inspires confidence in its supporters, then, because one part of the law throws a Hail Mary pass to prevent another part of the law from stripping Americans of the insurance that currently protects them from illness and impoverishment. Feel safer?

One of the law's biggest supporters offers reason to think the Hail Mary strategy won't work. MIT economist Jonathan Gruber projects the law will increase net premiums for six out of 10 people in Wisconsin's individual market by an average of 31 percent. (A study of Obamacare's impact on Ohio projected much larger premium increases for many individuals and businesses.) That is, low-risk people will still have plenty of reason to walk away. And insofar as the Hail Mary succeeds in delaying collapse, the growth in health insurance premiums will accelerate.

Klein writes, "One way of looking at the administration's [CLASS] decision is that it shows a commitment to fiscal responsibility." If so, then let's handle the rest of Obamacare exactly the same way. Congress should require Obamacare's health insurance provisions to be voluntary and self-sustaining, just like CLASS: no individual mandate, no taxpayer subsidies.

Or is fiscal irresponsibility part of the plan?


Michael F. Cannon is director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute and coauthor of Healthy Competition: What's Holding back Health Care and How to Free It.

This piece appeared here and is reprinted with permission.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/10/24/is_obamacare_meant_to_be_fiscally_irresponsible_111792.html