Paging Alex Trebek: CLASS Program Is in Jeopardy
That can be the only conclusion based from the articles in this morning’s papers – the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and The Hill. Among the highlights, outgoing CLASS actuary Bob Yee said:
- “Technically, Kathy Greenlee, the administrator for CLASS, is still in charge. But the staff, eight people in the office as of last week, will not be working on CLASS. They have been, or are in the process of being, reassigned.”
- “It’s difficult trying to find a solution [to CLASS’ solvency concerns] without an in-house actuary.”
- “My feeling is that they are not going to make some wonderful discovery [to make CLASS solvent]. You draw your own conclusion about what’s going to happen.”
- “Once you take a pause [in implementation], it’s hard to start back up.”
The Journal article also notes that the Administration specifically asked Democrats not to fund the CLASS program for Fiscal Year 2012 – suggesting a distinct lack of enthusiasm within HHS for a program that Secretary Sebelius admitted was “totally unsustainable” as written in the law. The two most likely scenarios:
- Either HHS thinks the program is unsustainable, and is putting the program in “cold storage” (rather than stopping implementation outright) to avoid answering embarrassing political questions – i.e., How did this unsustainable program end up in Obamacare? – ahead of the presidential election; or
- HHS thinks the program is unsustainable, and wants to wait until a potential Obama second term to implement it, solvency concerns notwithstanding.
Political questions aside, the only operative question at this point should be whether or not the program is sustainable. HHS has had 18 months to make such a determination – but so far the silence from the Administration on this front has been deafening. If it cannot be salvaged, it should be scrapped; to do otherwise would represent a waste of taxpayer dollars at a time when the federal government is running trillion-dollar deficits.