A Ponzi Scheme (Finally) Collapses
An op-ed by Secretary Sebelius admits that HHS will NOT be moving forward with CLASS Act implementation – a devastating indictment by the Administration itself of the unrealistic assumptions and budgetary gimmicks used to enact Obamacare. This development comes nearly two years AFTER Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad called the program a “Ponzi scheme of the first order.” That quote, along with the report of the CLASS Act Working Group, means that today’s development raises more questions than it answers:
- How many millions of dollars of taxpayer funds have been spent on CLASS implementation in the two years since career officials within the Department dubbed the program a recipe for disaster?
- At a time when the federal government faces trillion-dollar deficits, why did the Administration spend so long trying to salvage a program that was totally unsustainable from the get-go?
- Who will accept responsibility for this wasteful and unnecessary spending on CLASS implementation – all of which could have been avoided had the Administration listened to the advice of the non-partisan Medicare actuary?
- Why didn’t Secretary Sebelius publicly raise concerns her own staff were airing privately in early 2010 – BEFORE the bill was enacted – that CLASS would be unsustainable? Did she not know about the serious fiscal concerns being raised within her Department, or did she suppress this information to avoid damaging Obamacare’s chances of passage?
- Why did Secretary Sebelius and other HHS officials claim through much of 2011 that the Department had sufficient authority to modify the CLASS program to make it solvent, even though internal documents from January 2010 show cast doubts on the Secretary’s assertions – doubts that have now been proven correct?
In March 2010, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously claimed we had to pass the bill so the American people could find out what was in it. Today’s damning admission from HHS about the failures of the program Democrats trumpeted as “fiscally solvent” and a “deficit reducer” finally allows the American people to find out about the fiscal games and gimmicks used during Democrats’ headlong rush to enact Obamacare.