Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner warns today that news about the failure of ObamaCare’s CLASS Act for long-term care represents just the first of many such revelations we can expect in the coming weeks and months.
The CLASS Act’s flawed design is just the tip of the iceberg. The entire health care law rests on claims that won’t stand up to the test of reality. Just start with the Medicare cuts.
The Medicare program undeniably needs an overhaul, because it is the primary contributor to our nation’s long-term debt crisis. But Democrats have argued that the changes to Medicare they enacted (valued at about $500 billion at the time of passage) would help shore up the program’s finances, while also claiming that the $500 billion would help pay for Obamacare.
As the CBO and Richard Foster, the chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, have explained, however, this is double counting. In reality, the same $500 billion cannot simultaneously be used for both purposes.
It was Foster who warned the Obama administration about the CLASS Act back in July 2009, writing that, “Thirty-six years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order. …” So some of his other predictions are worth noting.
Asked about the Medicare cuts at a House Budget Committee meeting in July by Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Foster said, “It’s pretty hard to imagine they could be sustainable.”
The problem is that the law doesn’t control the underlying growth in health care costs, so cuts to payments to hospitals and other Medicare providers will be difficult for the system to simply absorb.
According to his office’s post-passage estimates, 15 percent of Medicare providers would become unprofitable within the first 10 years of the law’s enactment. And if Congress were to respond by scaling back the cuts, then the whole case that Obamacare was “paid for” completely falls apart.