Showing posts with label Obamacare. Show all posts
Piecemeal Repeal: Dems Cancel Long Term Care Provision of Obamacare
Drudge is headlining this as "Obamacare Unraveling," and that certainly is true. The Obama Administration has announced that it is canceling the section of Obamacare called the CLASS Act for being so unsustainable as to even horrify liberals.
The Obama administration's signature health overhaul law, under relentless assault by Republicans, has suffered its first major casualty - a long-term care insurance plan.
The program, expected to launch in 2012, had been dogged from the beginning by doubts over its financial solvency.
Proponents, including many groups that fought to pass the health care law, have vowed a vigorous effort to rescue the program, insisting that Congress gave the administration broad authority to make changes. Long-term care includes not only nursing homes, but such services as home health aides for disabled people.
...
Known as CLASS, the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program was a long-standing priority of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.
Although sponsored by the government, it was supposed to function as a self-sustaining voluntary insurance plan, open to working adults regardless of age or health. Workers would pay an affordable monthly premium during their careers and could collect a modest daily cash benefit of at least $50 if they became disabled later in life. The money could go for services at home or to help with nursing home bills.
But a central design flaw dogged CLASS. Unless large numbers of healthy people willingly sign up during their working years, soaring premiums driven by the needs of disabled beneficiaries would destabilize it, eventually requiring a taxpayer bailout.
The CLASS Act was supposed to accomplish three things: provide "free" long-term care for the elderly, burnish the Dems' reputation for compassion, and (most important) provide a crucial bit of accounting legerdemain to allow the CBO to score the overall health care law as being a budget reducer. The part about CLASS being a budget reduction program was especially ludicrous, almost silly, but its consequences were deadly serious for us all
In deep-sixing the CLASS Act, the Administration just forfeited $86 billion in savings on the Affordable Care Act. That’s because the CLASS Act was a net revenue positive in the ten-year window of the legislation, because it collected more in premiums that it paid out in the early years, according to CBO scoring.
So the effective nullification of the CLASS Act costs $86 billion. But it’s unlikely that $86 billion will be made up in any other way. If Congress repealed the CLASS Act, they might have to find offsets. But since the White House just isn’t going to implement the program, the savings won’t be realized but nobody has to worry about paygo or anything. It just blows a hole in the medium-term budget.
Forget everything else, you know there is something wrong with the system when an unsustainable entitlement program can be scored as, not just budget neutral, but as reducing the budget. This is a prime example of the cynic's phrase "the real scandal is what's legal." A lot of folks on the right have mused aloud that, were a CEO to offer the same number of outrageous lies used to pass Obamacare, he would be in Club Fed for life. Not so if you are a member of Congress or the President! Not only do they have legislative and executive immunity for their official acts, but they seem to have a near-bulletproof electoral immunity as well.
Not that this matters to the Left. People are already pitching a bitch over the Obama Administration's "cave." Cave to what? Math? Human nature? Not everything bad in the world happens because of racist Reupblicans, you know.
(Btw, according to this report, Judd Gregg was the one who managed to insert the requirement that CLASS be certified as sustainable over 75 years, which is what ultimately lead HHS to conclude the program couldn't be implemented as drafted. Sometimes those moderate NE Republicans can teach the rest of us a thing or two).
Every Republican in Congress voted against Obamacare. Conservatives rallied nationwide to protest its passage. Joe Wilson correctly, if rudely, yelled out "You Lie!" at some of Obama's most egregious whoppers (spoken at a joint session of Congress). And, most memorably, tens of thousands of people trooped to DC on the weekend of Obamacare's passage, surrounded the Capitol Building, and vigorously protested the impending cram down. For this we were called racist and worse. No, we were worried that a group of people who have no grasp of economic or common sense had seized the treasury and were re-writing some of the most basic economic relationships in our society. Sorry if you are offended when it turns out we were right.
On the other hand, every liberal in the land will no doubt defend Obamacare with all the usual well-thought out arguments about dog food, dead babies, and wearing your sister's dentures. It will simply never occur to them that their crazy anecdotes are not representative of the overall health care system, nor will it occur to them that market-based reforms - such as simply allowing health insurance to be sold across state lines the same way you sell freakin' toilet paper - will do a lot more good than their Brobdingnagian schemes.
Sunday Quick Links
It's one of those days when I can't pick just one thing to write about, but don't have time to write about everything:
If you were wondering how Michelle Obama's "secret" trip to Target (did she ever go to Target pre-2008? Does Chicago even have a Target within the city limits?) was memorialized on film, well it's because the White House tipped off the AP. Pretty pathetic.
Chris Christie is the man of the hour. Some say that he is the only (GOP) man for the times: a tough talker who can appeal to Reagan Democrats, and face down the public employee unions. Could be, but unions are only a sliver of the left coalition, and Christie has a lot of political sympathy for virtually every other element of the Democrat base. Among other things, he is as dumb on the environment as Joe Biden (or any other green). We can do better.
Paul Ryan reviews Jeffrey Sachs's new book, describing it as having "veneer of economic analysis cannot conceal what is essentially a crusade against the free enterprise ethic of our republic." Nice to see at least one GOP politician try to take on the intellectual heavies on the left.
This guy wants to believe that the present Wall Street protests are "like Egypt." The protesters are more than just the usual hippies, communists, and nose-ringed college students, says he. There are unions and "grannies" there! Very middle class! (pictures at the link). Right, well any union presence is going to be bused-in astro-turf. As for the "grannies," I think we're all hip to the truth, which is that old leftists like to grasp the mantle of respectable seniors, knowing the media will treat them as cuddly old folks, rather than as socialists who hate their country. Anyway, these protests not "like" Egypt; they are like Greece.
On the other hand, the apparently unprovoked pepper spraying of a couple protesters by a normally desk-bound "cop" is just the sort of thing the blame-America-first crowd loves. You'd think every police officer in NYC would be hip the way leftists use this sort of thing for their own propaganda. San Francisco cops sure do. But, as JFK used to say, there's always one dumb son of a bitch who never gets the word.
The al-Awlaki drone strike was a just result. He may have been "American-born," in the words of media style-books, but he left the US as a small child and was not acting in America's best interests. Obama's been getting this 100% right, but his ambivalence has been undermining his strategy.
An inside view of the intimidation of the health insurance industry during the passage of Obamacare. For all the talk of the "right wing noise machine," if a GOP president and his allies had tried something this heavy-handed, there would have been all sorts of "brave" dissidents rushing to the microphones. But, let Democrats do it, and everyone's all STFU. Has to be because they were worried about unflattering stories published by the White House's media allies - meaning the media - right?
Herman Cain's rise is due entirely to his being the only optimistic candidate. People clearly want to hear his message, yet Cain is held to be "unelectable." OK, assuming he's unelectable, that doesn't mean the "electable" candidates can't learn something from him and his methods.
Btw, I thought Cain (or Santorum) would "shock the world" by running strong in Iowa, but it seems Cain's moment is now, and not four months from now. That means the media will be "vetting" him. In other words, they'll be seeking damning quotes from every disgruntled employee, disappointed corporate rival, and bitter stripper ex-girlfriend (I kid, I kid) that they can find. These are never our republic's finest hours. In fact, they are some of our worst as the elites among us broadcast rumors and innuendos as if they were dispatches from the Somme. Hope Cain is ready for it. I also hope he is ready to fight back in the manner of Clarence Thomas, rather than flinch away in the manner of virtually every other GOP politico unfortunate to have gone through this process.
Michael Wilbon asks a damn good question about a new Walter Payton biography: "what is the exact purpose of writing a book, 12 years after Payton's depressing death at 45, that goes to agonizing lengths to tell us essentially that Payton was flawed?" Supposedly, it's because Payton's public persona was that of a solid citizen when in private he cheated on his wife and used, get this, pain killers. It's that darn hypocrisy, again! Really, a professional athlete who sleeps with women not his wife? That's news? What about a look at Mrs. Payton. Maybe she was a pain in the a**? And since when was pain killer use a scandal? What's really galling is knowing that journalists who love to flog this sort of information probably couldn't stand up to a similar level of scrutiny.
Good Points
Calling In Dr. Feelgood: Medicare Cuts Go Into Effect
They tell me the doctor Medicare cuts went through. You mean the AMA, with all their sound and fury signifying nothing, failed to influence our Congressional leadership?
Gee, who knew?
Folks, this was the plan. The cuts were supposed to go through. So look at it on the bright side. Our government just saved $250 billion!
And quietly, practices will downsize their nicest employees or close all together. Many others will speed up their flight to be bought by big hospital systems - but these hospital systems will be more selective when deciding who they admit to their ranks. Inner city hospitals, struggling for survival, will look to the government for more subsidies to meet their demands for survival. Government will comply to protect themselves. Big hospitals and health systems with lots of doctor-employees will point to the decreased revenue by their doctors, tighten their belts a bit more by maintaining their months-long hiring freezes indefinitely, and fail to give those productivity bonuses to their workers as their construction contracts for their additions continue to get paid as they get ready for the "Big Wave."
