Washington Post: White House eliminates insurance program for long-term care

[alexey]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/white-house-kills-long-term-care-program/2011/10/14/gIQAVZLYkL_story.html

The Obama administration ended a major benefit in the 2010 health-care law on Friday, announcing that a program to offer Americans insurance for long-term care was simply unworkable.

Although the program had been dogged from the start by doubts about its feasibility, its elimination marks the first time the administration has backed away from a key piece of what remains of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement.

Because the program had been projected to reduce the federal deficit by $86

billion over the next 10 years, terminating it complicates the nation’s budget picture. It is now estimated that the health-care law will cut the deficit by $124 billion from 2012 to 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Known as the Community Living Assistance Services (CLASS) Act, the program was intended to be purely voluntary and open to all working Americans. It would have provided a basic lifetime benefit of a least $50 a day in the event of disability, to be used for coverage of even nonmedical needs such as making a home wheelchair accessible, or paying a caregiver.

The program was to be entirely self-financed by the premiums participants paid. Obama officials said this presented them with a problem: If they designed a benefits package generous enough to meet the law’s requirements, they would have had to set premiums so high that few healthy people would enroll. And without a large share of healthy people in the pool, the CLASS plan would have become even more expensive, forcing the government to raise premiums even higher to the point of the program’s collapse.

...

This plan looks like it was a gimmick from the start.

[twa]

Lotta idiotic assumptions in the reform, kill it

[BRAVEONAWARPATH]

Lotta idiotic assumptions in the reform, kill it

And replace it with?

[twa]

And replace it with?

same thing we are replacing this with