House votes to repeal part of 2010 health care law

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Republican-led House on Wednesday voted to repeal a financially troubled part of the 2010 health care law that was designed to provide affordable long-term care insurance.

The House vote comes months after the Obama administration suspended the Community Living Assistance Services and Support program, known as the CLASS Act.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in October said she was unable to find a way to make the program financially solvent.

Still, the White House has said it does not support repealing the program, under which workers would pay a monthly premium during their careers and collect a daily cash benefit if they become disabled later in life.

Republicans have targeted the program as part of their overall goal of dismantling the health care overhaul law. Action on the bill in the Democratic-controlled Senate is uncertain.

The House vote was 267-159, with 28 Democrats joining all 239 voting Republicans in support.

The Senate has ignored House votes in the past year to repeal the entire health care law or to block funding for parts of it. One of the few changes Congress has been able to bring about concerned a requirement for small businesses to file more health care paperwork.

The CLASS Act was supposed to address the crisis in long-term care coverage. Currently some 10 million Americans need long-term care, and that number is expected to hit 15 million by 2020. But only about 8 percent of people buy private long-term care insurance.

Under the voluntary program, a priority of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, monthly premiums would be used to finance benefits of at least $50 a day for those needing long-term care. The money would go for services at home or to help with nursing home bills.

But government actuaries determined that unless a large number of healthy people signed up, premiums would have to soar to unaffordable levels to meet the growing needs of the disabled.

Experts have concluded, said Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., that "the CLASS program can't be operated without mandatory participation so as to ensure its solvency." Unless it is terminated, he said, "it poses a clear danger to the fiscal health of our budget and to the American taxpayer."

The administration finally has come to the conclusion "that we knew even before the bill passed, that this was unsustainable, it was unworkable, it was fatally flawed," said the bill's sponsor, Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La.

But Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said the Republican goal was to "tear down and dismantle programs that provide health care in the United States." He said "the solution is to amend the program to make it work, not just repeal it and leave nothing in its place."

Breitbart.com via Free Republic

We did it! We killed the CLASS Act, a key component of ObamaCare

We did it!  We took down CLASS!

Today the White House officially pulled the plug on the CLASS Act, a key component of ObamaCare.

This is a huge development in the health care debate. 

CLASS -- a Great Society style nursing home care entitlement authored by liberal lion Ted Kennedy -- was enacted in 2010 as part of ObamaCare.

But CLASS was poorly designed and actuarially unsound, and represented a massive taxpayer bailout risk.

And the folks in President Obama's HHS knew it.

But they gagged their own internal experts in 2009 and 2010, to keep the risk from being known publicly.

Had Congress and the American people known about the bailout risk, ObamaCare would very likely not have become law.

Last month, a congressional investigation finally exposed the internal warnings, and the White House's stone wall began to crumble.

Even the socialized-medicine zealots in the Obama Administration could no longer deny the truth.

With the president's poll numbers in the tank, and his reelection in serious doubt, they decided to cut their losses. The new nursing home entitlement had to go.

Today, they put out the announcement. They will not proceed with implementing this turkey. CLASS is dead.

This is a sweet victory for the many Americans who fought long and hard to stop ObamaCare from passing -- and one tinged with bitter irony, because of CLASS's key role in the law's enactment.

The new entitlement had been added to ObamaCare as a budget gimmick. It had been purposely crafted to look like a revenue-generator during its first 5 years of operation, when the government would be collecting premiums from participants but not yet paying out benefits. This would make the federal books look better by some $70 billion during the period, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And this in turn enabled congressional Democrats and the President to mask ObamaCare's true costs. By appending CLASS to ObamaCare, they could crow that the controversial legislation "wouldn't cost taxpayers a dime."

Well, their own actuaries knew otherwise, but couldn't say so publicly. CLASS would have cost taxpayers trillions of dimes.

If not repealed, ObamaCare will cost us even more than that: trillions of dollar, and more important, our freedom to control our own health care.

Meanwhile, the President's egregious mishandling of the health care issue is already costing the nation terribly, with health plan premiums rising and some economists blaming the new law, which doesn't take full effect for another two years, for continuing economic uncertainty and poor job growth.

Folks, the fall of CLASS is just the start.

In jettisoning this one flawed piece, the president's advisors may think they've made the law easier to preserve. But instead, they've confirmed their own cynicism, dishonesty, and wrongheadedness, and thus given momentum to the movement to fully repeal the law -- and replace it with a truly patient-centered system.

Congress should hold immediate hearings on this fiasco. What did the White House know, and when did they know it?

Meanwhile, we should savor this victory -- it's a taste of more to come.

(For more information, read our report on the CLASS Act coverup.)

Dean Clancy is FreedomWorks' Legislative Counsel and VP Health Care Policy.