Impeding changes to our Health Care system

[TheMercenary]

Rut-row.... More evidence of fudged numbers.

When ObamaCare passed, the Obama administration’s top officials repeatedly assured the public that it was not just fiscally sound but fiscally responsible: a path toward long-term deficit reduction and better health care budgeting. What the White House and its allies neglected to mention was that they’d tacked an unworkable, unsustainable $70 billion long-term care entitlement onto the bill in order to dress up its official budget projections. It’s called the CLASS (Community Living Assistance Service and Supports) Act, and it helped ObamaCare score big on decade-long deficit reduction estimates. Its designers even promised that it would be self-sustaining for at least 75 years.

It’s not. Starting around 2030, the program will spend far more than it takes in, leading to tens of billions in new deficit spending with each successive decade. Whose idea of fiscal responsibility was this?

President Obama signed the health care overhaul into law, but it was former Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) who made the push to include CLASS in the package. According to Timothy Carney of The Washington Examiner, Kennedy’s former aide Connie Garner played a key role in crafting the legislation governing the program. Just two months after the law passed, Gardner left Capitol Hill to take a job as the CEO at a new advocacy coalition funded by long-term care industry groups and dedicated to—you guessed it—lobbying Congress on the CLASS Act. CLASS may cost America dearly. But it seems to be paying off for Gardner and her clients.

It also paid off for the Obama administration in the health care fight. When the Congressional Budget Office scored the budgetary effects of the law, it counted the $70 billion in premium payments expected to be collected in the program’s first decade toward the law’s alleged deficit reduction—despite the fact that those premiums were eventually supposed to pay for the program’s benefits.

The White House conveniently failed to notice the program's problems during the health care debate. But last fall, the president’s own fiscal commission officially called for a total repeal of the program.

http://reason.com/archives/2011/05/2...trous-new-long