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This admin gets the prize for most released news items on late Friday.

 

Obama administration halts part of health care law

The Obama administration announced Friday that it has suspended one piece of the landmark health care law which the president signed last year.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius told Congress in a letter that the CLASS Act, which was supposed to provide a new voluntary long-term care insurance program, was unworkable since no actuarially sound way could be figured out to run the program.

“I do not see a viable path forward for CLASS implementation at this time,” Sebelius said in her letter.

CLASS stands for “Community Living Assistance Services and Supports.”

The CLASS Act was a significant piece of the health care bill because it helped make it deficit neutral over the first ten years after enactment, as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office. Thus CLASS helped garner the votes to help the bill pass.

According to the CBO, the CLASS program would have reduced federal deficits by $86 billion in first 10 years, partly offsetting the increased federal spending due to the other parts of the health care bill. In the first years of CLASS, enrollees would be paying premiums into it but would not be able to collect benefits until 2016.

In a memo to Congress in April of 2010, Medicare’s chief actuary Richard Foster warned that the program would “face a significant risk of failure” because sicker people would tend to sign up for it and the costs would soon exceed the premium payments. The program, he said, would likely be “unsustainable.”

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The health care overhaul is falling apart before it even takes effect.

 

As for Cain's plan, it's not a gimmick. It is a new approach to a tax system that has over 70,000 pages of codes and bs. It's a first step to a Fair Tax.  Do I see any of it actually happening? No.

 

But at least Cain will be trying to change the status quo.

Originally Posted by b50m:

The health care overhaul is falling apart before it even takes effect.

 

As for Cain's plan, it's not a gimmick. It is a new approach to a tax system that has over 70,000 pages of codes and bs. It's a first step to a Fair Tax.  Do I see any of it actually happening? No.

 

But at least Cain will be trying to change the status quo.

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Change the status quo. That's EXACTLY what Obama tried to do with our broken healthcare system. No one had the guts to even try before, even though politicians had been talking about it for decades.

 

If Cain should be given credit for trying against all odds, so should Obama.

 

And in this case, he wanted to try something IF IT COULD BE PROVEN THAT IT COULD PAY FOR ITSELF. Even before this finding, he had agreed to scrap it if it wouldn't work. That shows me that A) he tried, and B) he isn't trying to ram it down anybody's throat, as he is so often accused of.

 

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