Not Adding Up

So, the government admitted this week that a major portion of the health care legislation passed by Congress as pushed for by President Obama won’t work.  CLASS, intended to provide for voluntary low-cost, long-term care insurance, can’t be made to work fiscally, according to the Congressional Budget Office.  The administration’s Health and Human Services department has admitted that they have no way to make the numbers work.

One of probably many problems this creates is that this particular piece of the health care reform legislation was intended to off-set the costs of the other portions of the legislation.  To the tune of $86 billion dollars over the next ten years.  Now that CLASS is not going to work, that means the price tag on the health care reform just jumped by $86 billion dollars.

Again, I don’t profess to be a political expert.  But it seems to me that what was included as a way of making the health care reform legislation more balanced and less costly has now, after the fact, been demonstrated to be the stuff of fairy tales.  That seems like rather an egregious error.  And an expensive one as well.  At least for you and I.