CLASS dismissed

Opinion: October 20, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

CLASS dismissed

Chicago Tribune: The picture keeps getting darker for the Obama administration’s health care reform program. Last Friday, one big part of it got eliminated — not by Congress and not by the courts, but by the Department of Health and Human Services. Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, abandoning a new program to provide long-term care for the elderly, announced, “I do not see a viable path forward.”

That may sound like a sensible admission, and it is. But the administration’s decision to scrap the effort is still a couple of years late. This is not a problem that emerged only recently, as a consequence of unforeseen developments. On the contrary, it was obvious all along.

The initiative, known as Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS), was supposed to cover services needed to let the elderly live at home, as well as nursing home stays. But it ran up against a harsh reality: Young and healthy people are generally uninterested in buying such coverage, and the people likely to buy it are also likely to take advantage of it.

So the money going out would eventually exceed the money coming in.

Obama pressed on anyway. Worse yet, the administration pretended that the program would actually help pay for the rest of its health insurance plans. About $70 billion of the savings from the health care overhaul would allegedly come from the CLASS program.

The collapse of the CLASS program is the first casualty of the failure to create a system that was fiscally prudent and sustainable, but probably not the last.