Major Obamacare Ooops

by **TexasBlue** Mon Oct 17, 2011 7:56 pm

Major Obamacare Ooops

Neal Boortz
Oct. 17, 2011

"We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it," said Nancy Pelosi in March 2010.

It passed. So what’s in it? What’s in it is a failed attempt at Obamanomics: fudging the numbers and trying to produce something for “nothing.” ObamaCare legislation is a case-in-point example of how politicians are able to cook the books in order to make the numbers fit their narrative. Now we are seeing that those numbers do not match reality…

The Obama administration says it is unable to go forward with a major program in the president’s signature health care overhaul law — a new long-term care insurance plan.

Officials said Friday the long-term care program has critical design flaws that can’t be fixed to make it financially self-sustaining.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told Congress in a letter that she does not see a viable path forward at this time. By law, implementation of the program was contingent on Sebelius certifying it financially sound.

The program was supposed to be a voluntary insurance plan for working adults regardless of age or health. Workers would pay an affordable monthly premium during their careers, and could collect a modest daily cash benefit if they became disabled later in life.

The problem all along has been how to ensure enough healthy people would sign up.

On top of that. This Class program was a major contributor to the supposed deficit reduction claim of ObamaCare. The Wall Street Journal explains how we were duped…

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's act of fiscal damage control is still a welcome if overdue admission that ObamaCare's claims of deficit reduction were always an illusion.

Democrats engineered the program known by the acronym Class with front-loaded premiums and back-loaded benefits so that on paper it threw off a lot of revenue early on but then bankrupted itself later. This design made it possible for the Congressional Budget Office to score the program as a money-raiser during its first decade and thus make ObamaCare look like it reduced the deficit. And sure enough, CBO, in its final estimate at passage, said that Class would reduce the deficit by $70 billion through 2019—or more than half the bill's supposed $124 billion 10-year "savings" to the federal fisc. Well, goodbye to all that.

So here’s how this happened:

Come up with a bill that is so large and impossible to comprehend, that we can be assured a rare few will actually read it.

Include programs that are financially unworkable, but sound good enough to gain popular support.

Fudge the numbers to make it seem as though this giant bill will actually reduce our deficit, knowing that most of the deficit reduction claims lie in programs that are financially impossible to implement.

Pass the bill.

Over a year later, release documents late on a Friday night saying, “Oops! Turns out that program we promised you, the one that would insure everyone AND reduce our deficit … yeah, turns out that it is impossible to do that. Nevermind!”

Is it any wonder our economy is in the shape that it is in with incompetent hacks running the show in Washington?

Adding insult to injury, remember when Nancy Pelosi said that ObamaCare “will create 400,000 jobs almost immediately?” Take a look at the effect ObamaCare has had on job creation in this country …