Heritage
Foundation
Morning
Bell: The Slow Dismantling
of Obamacare
By Amy Payne
January 7, 2013
Things
aren’t going so well for
Obamacare.
Even
Democrats in Congress aren’t
huge fans any more. It seems after passing the law and finding out
what’s in
it, the allure has faded—so much so that Congress actually repealed
part of
Obamacare in the fiscal cliff deal last week.
That’s
right—part of Obamacare has
been completely undone. It was the Community Living Assistance Services
and
Supports (CLASS) Act, essentially a new entitlement program for
long-term care.
But this new government program for people who end up needing assisted
living
or other long-term services was poorly designed and bound to fail, as Heritage’s Alyene
Senger explains.
“CLASS
was a bad deal for both
taxpayers (who would likely have had to bail out the program) and
beneficiaries
(who would be better served by choosing among private options),” Senger
wrote.
The
program was so poorly designed
that one of its own administrators warned Congress in 2011 that the
program
could collapse.
This
is just one example of how
poorly thought out Obamacare was—but this example so captured
Congress’s
attention that it spurred action. Another part of Obamacare that just
took effect,
the medical device tax, started making some Senators uneasy before it
was
scheduled to begin.
A
group of 18 Senators, including
such outspoken Democrats as Al Franken (MN), John Kerry (MA), Charles
Schumer
(NY), and Debbie Stabenow (MI), asked Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)
to
delay the tax, which falls on every item used in medical treatments,
from
stents to syringes, IV tubes, and prosthetics…
Read
the rest of the article at The
Heritage Foundation
|