Obama admits chunk of health reform unworkable

photo President Barack Obama gestures during a news conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Wednesday. (AP Photo)

In a remarkable reversal, the Obama administration has at long last been forced to admit that the ObamaCare socialized medicine law passed by Democrats in Congress in 2010 has huge financial flaws.

One part of the mammoth law is a long-term care program called the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program, or CLASS. But word began leaking out of Washington in recent days that the administration wanted to put the brakes on implementing the CLASS portion of ObamaCare because it is fiscally unsustainable.

And then finally, late last week, the administration made it official that it would not implement the CLASS program, precisely because it's financially unworkable.

The administrator of the program stated that premiums for the CLASS program could rise to as much as $3,000 a month -- for a benefit that would later pay only about $50 a day!

As currently structured, this portion of ObamaCare would "quickly collapse," administrator Kathy Greenlee said in a memo to Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services.

And so, the Obama administration has simply declared that it will not put the CLASS part of ObamaCare into effect.

U.S. Sen. Bob Corker of Chattanooga minced no words in pointing out what a shell game all this is.

"There's no way anybody could defend the accounting for this program with a straight face ...," Corker stated in a news release.

Appropriately, he has co-sponsored bills to repeal both the CLASS program and ObamaCare as a whole.

Isn't it ironic that President Barack Obama, who pushed so hard for ObamaCare, is now declining to implement a major part of it for fear that at least that portion of the "reform" will go broke?

Weren't the American people promised again and again before ObamaCare passed that it would in fact massively reduce health care spending?

Is this the kind of thing that Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi was talking about when she said before ObamaCare's passage, "[W]e have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy"?

Well, the "fog" is now clearing -- and what we're seeing is not at all encouraging.

But the Obama administration's decision to put the CLASS portion of ObamaCare on hold gets even more bizarre.

Since the long-term care program isn't being implemented, the government isn't collecting premiums for it. And yet those tens of billions of dollars in uncollected premiums are still being "counted" as reducing federal budget deficits!

That's just smoke and mirrors!

Many Americans were justifiably skeptical of ObamaCare before it passed -- and unfortunately our people have even more reason to be skeptical of ObamaCare now.

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