How Liberals Would “Fix” CLASS: Another Mandate
Most readers have probably already seen this morning’s Congressional Budget Office blog post indicating that CBO would not score a budgetary impact of repeal of the CLASS Act, given the Administration’s announcement last Friday that it was suspending program implementation.* But you may not have seen an article by the New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn, who starts off by eating at least a little bit of proverbial crow by admitting that he and other liberals “ignored” CLASS’ fiscal flaws:
[Senator] Thune has a point – in part. The official budget estimates for CLASS suggested it would save money in the first ten years, accounting for about half of the deficit reduction that the Affordable Care Act was supposed to yield during that time. But the estimates for CLASS were never that reliable. More important, after those first ten years, CLASS was likely to pay out more in benefits than it collected as premiums. For these reasons, conservatives like Peter Suderman who criticized CLASS as unsustainable were right to raise alarms, while liberals like me were wrong to ignore them.
But Cohn goes on from that welcome concession to argue that what would “fix” the CLASS program is requiring every American to purchase long-term care insurance:
The sustainability of CLASS would not have been in such question if everybody had to sign up for it. In other words, if long-term care insurance were subject to an individual mandate, old and sick people would not have been the only people enrolling.
Cohn makes the point that the rest of Obamacare, unlike CLASS, is not in fiscal danger precisely because it has an individual requirement to purchase health insurance. But in many respects, that’s the point – the mandate IS in jeopardy, because multiple federal courts have ruled the unprecedented requirement unconstitutional. And if one mandate is unprecedented – and constitutionally dubious – why include a second mandate to boot?
For months, conservatives have asserted – just as they asserted CLASS would be proven insolvent – that if the individual mandate is ruled constitutional, there is little the federal government could not require from its citizens. Peter Orszag first referenced the idea of mandatory participation in CLASS over the summer. The Justice Department likewise conceded in a Pennsylvania courtroom that mandatory long-term care insurance would be constitutional. And the blithe way with which the left has been willing to suggest additional mandates – even before the Supreme Court rules on Obamacare’s individual mandate – proves that conservative concerns about proliferating requirements on individuals to obey liberals’ manifold (and multiplying) commands may soon prove as prescient as those concerns raised about CLASS two years ago.
* For those of you who have wondered how HHS could decide not to implement a law, Obamacare requires the Secretary to certify CLASS’ solvency before moving forward with the program. So HHS was not breaking the law by allowing a fiscally unsustainable program to go forward – indeed, HHS would have been breaking the law had it allowed the program to go ahead, given the statutory requirement to certify solvency.