Obamacare is now “CLASSless”

Obama’ quietly has struck a part of his own Obamacare bill because, guess what, it’s unsustainable and now tha plug has been pulled on the “CLASS Act,” Community Living Assistance Service and Supports, part of Obamacare.

CLASS was the part of Obamacare most heavily championed by Ted Kennedy and also heavily backed by AARP and was supposed to have provided ongoing long term care and was meant to keep the elderly out of long term care facilities. It would have cost workers a ton and would have burdened private insurance companies and ultimately, the American taxpayers.

Average premiums would have run from around $200.00 to nearly $400.00 but could have, in some cases, run as high as $3000.00. Low income individuals would have only been charged $5.00 per month for the coverage but here was the giant problem…According to the CBO…the annual payout for those $5.00/month contributors would have been around $27,000.00.

Workers would have had $2,800.00/year automatically taken by the government for this program and would have had no choice but to enroll in it.

CLASS would have relied on the healthy young workers to cover the elderly for long term care outside of facilities.

Socialism always works until you run out of other people’s money.

Numbers are funny things, especially when they don’t add up and that is exactly what happened here. The “CLASS Act” portion of Obamacare all depended on the Secretary of Health and Human Services giving it the fiscal nod. After nearly 18 months of squeezing, twisting, crunching and spinning the numbers, Kathleen Sebelius just couldn’t make it work. In fact she couldn’t even come close and this came as no surprise to most republicans and even a few liberals had warned against this part of Obamacare.

According to democrat senator Kent Conrad said “CLASS” was, “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.”

“Class would have caused a great number of businesses to drop insurance for millions of employees which would have forced them to go from private coverage into the socialized Obamacare coverage at what some have estimated at a trillion dollar price tag to American Taxpayers.

Given the fact that it was indeed unsustainable, Obama used Executive Order to strike CLASS from Obamacare and so informed congress late on Friday.

Because “Class” was dependent on the nod from HHS, Obama was allowed to, without going through congress, strike it by Executive Order.

Almost half of what Obama has claimed would be deficit reduction from the passage of Obamacare was tied to “CLASS” and now, without it, what had been told to taxpayers would be 140 billion dollars in deficit reduction over 10 years is down to about 60-70 billion dollars.

One has to wonder, if they were that far off on “CLASS” just how far off, or how accurate is the remaining 60-70 billion dollars in savings this administration has claimed?

“At first glance this proposal doesn’t look workable,” were the words in an email to HHS from Richard Foster who was heading up the long range economic forecast for Medicare back in 2009 before Obamacare was even passed.

“Seems like a recipe for disaster to me,” is what a senior aging policy official, William Marton wrote of “CLASS” also back in 2009.

Obama had the warnings regarding “CLASS” before Obamacare ever went to congress for passage and yet, “CLASS” was included. In doing this, and by claiming more savings than were possible along with claiming that “CLASS” was sustainable, Obama and those who made it their mission to shove Obamacare down the throats of Americans…lied.

For several days leading up to the plug pulling on “Class” administration officials continued to claim this was not going to be the case and while those claims were being made, key personel were being either layed off or reassigned. Clearly the idea behind this deception was to divert attention of the demise of “CLASS” and also makes clear why the official death of it wasn’t announced until late Friday, after the high cycle of the news for the week had passed.

What we can read into this is that Obama and his administration are embarrassed by it and didn’t want to face questions regarding their backing of it until they had a full weekend to implement spin control.

Others besides Obama and his administration have quite a bit of explaining to do regarding “CLASS” and among them are unions and AARP, both of whom were heavy hitting proponents of this debacle.

One of the primary proponents of “CLASS” has been the SEIU and as late as the beginning of October, they were nearly demanding that Obama and his administration keep “CLASS” as a part of Obamacare which is odd when you consider the large number of waivers from Obamacare received over the last year by unions.

For their part, AARP also vocally promoted “CLASS” and staked a good deal of their political capital on it. In a letter from September 30th, AARP and other advocacy groups wrote to Obama stating that the act, “will allow millions of citizens to plan ahead, take personal responsibility, and… not be forced to give up being a productive citizen in order to access the services they need. We will continue to fight passionately for the implementation of the CLASS program. Mr. President, Congress gave you the authority to make necessary changes to the design of CLASS to make it work. We fully expect the Administration to go forward and use that authority in implementing the law.”

The apparent demise of “CLASS” should not be taken as a victory over Obamacare but as a step in the right direction. The only way to kill it and bury it is by congressional repeal.

What we can and should take from this is clear evidence of lies and deception by Obama and this administration regarding elements of Obamacare and the highly questionable desires of those who have and continue to advocate for it.

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