The Health and Human Services Department said today it is walking away from efforts to implement a long-term care entitlement program included in last year’s healthcare reform law.
The program, called Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS), is voluntary, provides a very modest benefit, and was not designed to remain solvent for long. CLASS quickly became a lightning rod for fiscal hawks looking for low-hanging fruit to trim from the federal budget.
The demise of CLASS began several months ago when HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius candidly announced what those paying close attention to the program already knew: as designed it was not sustainable, and it would need Congressional action to fix it.
Not much chance of that, not in today’s economic and political environments. When HHS symbolically turned out the lights on CLASS last month by reassigning employees tasked with implementing the program, and not even Democratic senators pushed to authorize implementation funding in HHS’s 2012 budget, it was all over but the shouting.
Expect Congress to repeal CLASS outright, as part of the $1.5 trillion deficit reduction effort.