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The CLASS Act, created by Ted Kennedy and included in the Affordable Care Act, establishes a voluntary federal long-term care insurance program. Currently, people requiring long-term care need either private insurance or to qualify for Medicaid. Right now, around 40% of all long-term care is funded through Medicaid, and given that Medicaid faces budget cuts that could rip it of its effectiveness, that’s simply not sustainable. Under the CLASS Act, subscribers could purchase an affordable long-term care insurance policy run by the government, to give them a modicum of protection in their later years.
The Gang of Six, in their plan for austerity, eliminated the CLASS Act before it even had a chance to collect any premiums or set up its systems. Kent Conrad never liked the CLASS Act, and now he got his wish. There were concerns about the financing over the long term, but importantly, CBO estimated that the CLASS Act would actually be a net benefit to federal revenues over the next ten years, by about $78 billion. Howard Gleckman writes:
While CLASS is deeply flawed, it is an opportunity to transform long-term care from the means-tested Medicaid program to an insurance-based system. If CLASS is repealed, that opportunity will be lost, and millions of Americans will find themselves with only a shrinking Medicaid benefit to support them in frail old age or if they become disabled at a younger age [...]
While advocacy groups such as Leading Age, which represents some non-profit long-term care providers, immediately urged the CLASS repeal be dropped from the budget bill, I suspect their concerns will fall on deaf ears. CLASS is a tiny piece of a huge fiscal package and I see no one on Capitol Hill willing to defend it aggressively. With Obama and Congress looking for a way out of fiscal gridlock, CLASS will likely be lost in the noise of the bigger budget debate.
If so, CLASS will be remembered as a sadly missed opportunity, and those of us who worry about how the nation will fund long-term care will find ourselves back at square one.
This just shows the short-sightedness of the bean counters in Washington. The more intelligent way to look at this is, we have a problem with long-term care. It’s not affordable as private insurance, and Medicaid struggles to give even a meager benefit. We could let people die in their homes alone, or we could design a program to provide a cheaper insurance package, run by the government, that could give some aid and comfort. We could even make it self-sustaining if we tried.
But “we do big things” is a mantra only for cutting budgets these days, not providing help to the afflicted.
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And with alternatives available to the Obama Admin regarding the ‘debt ceiling’, one can only accept that such actions are ok by Obama.
Optional long term care insurance backed by taxpayers is like optional subsidized medical insurance without a mandate backed by Medicaid and Medicare (available to everyone under certain cases the private market won’t cover like lifetime dialysis after renal failure, or lifetime care after any major paralysis).
The people who have reason to believe they will need the long term care and have significant assets to protect will buy the insurance, but those with low risk or no real assets, but potentially high incomes they spend living high, will simply let other taxpayers cover their disability.
But let’s put the blame on the conservatives who will not carry their policies to the natural outcomes: if you don’t have wealth or insurance to cover your needs, you should let the market decide, and the market considers your body to be worth more when dismembered and sold for salvage. The inconsistency is in the free market conservatives refusing to support euthanasia and for profit sale of body parts.
Health care in a free market should be like auto care – when you check your car into the repair shop and can’t pay to have it fixed and can’t pay for the towing to and away from the shop, the mechanic takes your car, kills it by dismembering it and sells it for scrap, or maybe he repairs and makes it work for him to make money, like a slave, maybe selling it, like a slave.
If conservatives won’t treat people like cares, then health care can’t operate like free market auto care. No one buys long term auto care insurance to have it maintained for decades after it is no longer useful – rich or devoted owners will care for those they revere, but they do it out of their own pockets.
The problem isn’t Democrats failing to defend bad policies that sidestep the fundamental dishonesty of conservative Republicans, the problem is the fundamental dishonest of conservatives who promise the voters a free lunch. Conservatives never say that Medicaid is evil because people should die if conservatives deem them worthless because they are poor and unproductive. Instead they say liberals are evil for taxing everyone because liberals value the poor and unproductive, implying that the poor and unproductive are totally different from everyone else because they chose to be poor and unproductive.
Those people who are 80 and unable to work 12 hour days picking cotton chose to be 80 and frail – a conservative would have chosen to be 30 and a high pay computer engineer instead. No conservative would ever chose to be 80 and frail – only liberals make that choice.
Conservatives would never need CLASS and will never pay for it, so CLASS is only for liberals who will chose to need long term care.
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Very glad you picked up on this DDay. Corker and Conrad have both been after this repeal, and it was on the Catfood Commission hit list. Again it has less to do with the deficit or healthcare than it does with bolstering the insurance companies and the financial advisers who help people hide assets from Medicaid.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=44784