How stupid do they think we are?

In the House "Affordable Health Care for America Act," and the Senate "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" bills, are provisions to establish the "Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Program. These programs are ostensibly created to create a new federal program for long-term care insurance. However, for those who are observing the gaming of the CBO process by both houses of Congress, this is a transparent attempt at making "reform" look "affordable." As the CBO points out, "Because participation in the program is voluntary, collections of insurance premiums uncer CLASS would be recorded as offsetting receipts (a credit against direct spending)."  Over the 2010-2019 period, CLASS would reduce deficits between $72 billion and $102 billion. This is a replay of the Social Security/Medicare ponzi scheme, where a "Trust Fund" is created with the taxes paid into the CLASS trust fund. The replay is also seen when rather than that cash remaining in the "Trust Fund," earning interest, the Congress takes that cash to fund spending, leaving the "Trust Fund" with an IOU from the Treasury. This is an IOU that will be in addition to the unfunded mandates for Social Security and Medicare that total $107 trillion dollars!

Now, normal people would see this as the ponzi scheme that it is, but CLASS enrollees would have to pay premiums for only five years to be vested in the program. This suggests that the program will experience adverse selection with people close (can achieve vesting) to retirement being more likely to sign up for this. If your young, you may see this as the scam that it is and decide not to throw good money after bad. If you're hard working and successful and prudent in your spending and saving, you have to know that you will not get "one dime" from Social Security. By they time you retire, Congress will "means test" you out of your promised benefits. This will likely be the case in CLASS as well. According the to CBO, "Both the House and Senate legislation would provide considerable authority to the Secretary (of HHS) to adjust premiums for both current and future enrollees and to reduce benefits to the daily minimum of $50 in order to maintain the solvency of the program. By the time you retire, because the money has long been spent, you will likely pay higher premiums for lower benefits. Bernie Madoff would be proud to be associated with these programs.

In the 2010-2019 period, the House version will collect (per CBO) $123.1b in premiums and pay out $21.5b in benefit payments and costs. The Senate version will collect $87.6b in premiums and pay out $15.1b in benefit payments and costs. This is easy budgetary pickings for the snake oil salesmen in Congress. It's like selling a life insurance policy; You get the premium today and let someone else worry about paying the claim in the (hopefully) distant future.

The CBO can't be faulted in this because they can only score the bills as they are written. The real blame needs to be placed squarely on the shoulders of the crooks in Congress who have learned to "reverse engineer" the CBO process. We've seen this before with the "doc fix," where they took it out of the "Reform" bills and passed it on a stand alone basis to extend the appearance that "Reform" is "Affordable," when it's neither!

In future elections, we need to remember who these "CLASSy" players are and send them into a new civil program - Cheats lose all serving socialism (CLASS).