Dropping the CLASS Act fiction
Now that it’s not needed any more to help the CBO score Obamacare as reducing the deficit, the CLASS Act portion of the bill is being dropped and revealed as the dysfunctional charade it always was:
“CLASS is a critical backstop, giving working families a tool to protect themselves from being one illness or injury away from poverty,” said Garner, who directs a group called Advance CLASS Inc. “The president promised to implement this program. We expect him to keep that promise.”
The program was a long-cherished goal of Kennedy, whose support helped ensure that it was folded into the larger health-care measure despite resistance from prominent Democrats and even the White House.
Its path to inclusion was also eased by projections that, at least initially, it would boost the federal balance sheet by tens of billions of dollars. This was because the law barred the program from paying out benefits for the first five years. So by adding the program to the health-care legislation, Democrats were able to substantially increase the deficit savings they could claim for the law as a whole.
The goals of the CLASS Act were and still are laudable. Unfortunately, the financial realities are such that it’s unworkable. That didn’t stop it from being included in the original bill, or for the CBO to use it to score half the deficit savings the HCR bill was supposed to accomplish. Now the truth can be told:
Democrats engineered the program known by the acronym Class with front-loaded premiums and back-loaded benefits so that on paper it threw off a lot of revenue early on but then bankrupted itself later. This design made it possible for the Congressional Budget Office to score the program as a money-raiser during its first decade and thus make ObamaCare look like it reduced the deficit. And sure enough, CBO, in its final estimate at passage, said that Class would reduce the deficit by $70 billion through 2019””or more than half the bill’s supposed $124 billion 10-year “savings” to the federal fisc. Well, goodbye to all that…HHS’s own experts were warning Democrats all along that Class was a fiscal time bomb, so including it in the bill was a special act of fiscal corruption.
Love that phrase “a special act of fiscal corruption”—that is, among the more ordinary acts of fiscal corruption that so often are part of Congress’s dealings, and were particularly prevalent in the passage of Obamacare. And the CBO is part of the problem rather than the solution. As I wrote back in December of 2009:
I was thinking today that the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) serves no useful purpose anymore.
It’s not allowed to tell the truth. Instead, it has become the tool of a Congress willing, eager, and all too skilled at tailoring legislation to achieve a certain desired CBO score based on assumptions everyone knows are invalid. The CBO is not allowed to call Congress on its games when it evaluates bills.
So why bother? The CBO has become a way to give the imprimatur of fiscal propriety to bills that are essentially scams, and the CBO is powerless to do anything but be a yes-man to whatever a clever and duplicitous Congress manages to come up with.
So how about some sort of realistic scoring by the CBO? Is that too much to ask?
Apparently.
Well:
I’m glad you noted Obama backstabbing , yet again, his allegedly “left wing” base(I’m denying they are his “base” except the ones who vote solely for “identity politics” or “I’ve always voted Dem!” reasons).
Meanwhile , in another thread you have people arguing over whether Herman Cain, an eminently qualified man, is “qualified enough” to be POTUS.
Let me put it bluntly: Compared to Obama and fully half the Republicans in the primary, Bozo the Clown is more qualified.
And while I’m sure plenty of government programs could use a good independent audit (including the Fed and the two mortgagers), so two could the DEA , which currently gets 9 billion bucks trying to expand its paramilitary mission around the world.
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2011/10/15/21315/546
Of course, unlike them I won’t whine about the DEA managing to stumble across the Iranians little assassination attempt. But I am going to complain about the rest of that stuff.
When the “left” and the “right” seem to support their own brands of authoritarian fascism, this country does not deserve to survive.
Addendum:
The DEA budget is 2 billion a year. I misremembered. The total federal law enforcement budget is 9.5 billion, though if one counts interagency cooperation and some “off the books” stuff, I’m willing to bet its larger.
Wat too much to ask. My desiderata are much more modest.
I just hope when the world stops taking dollars and the price of bread goes to $50 a loaf the schmuck with a bad haircut and cadres of narcissistic closet pedophiles who comes to save us from Capitalism and Corporations the cadres are quartered at the summer homes of the intelligentsia who swooned at their romantic slogans.
Is there anything in the bill that is actually an improvement in the status quo?
Does anyone remember the promise to carrythe health care debate live on C-Span?
Does anyone remember the promise that all this magic produced behind closed doors would lower the cost of health care?
I do. I didn’t believe him then and it turns out I was right to be skeptical. Repeal.Obamcare.Now!
This was the first year that long term care insurance had an “open season” for federal employees in two decades. Close to 50,000 people signed up. They did it to support this doomed program.
First the multi-state anti-Obamacare lawsuit, the 2010 election debacle, the refusal of the Democrats to support his legislation, now this. We all must have felt nauseous watching the media and public celebrate the blatant fraud Obama and the homage paid by both during his inauguration. Now that the silly edifice is crumbling I wonder what the last act will look like. Perhaps then we’ll be able to figure out whether this whole episode qualifies as a drama or comedy.