CORRUPTION ERUPTION: Obamacare’s Great Unraveling - Rich Lowry

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Obamacare’s Great Unraveling - Rich Lowry - National Review Online

RICH LOWRY

OCTOBER 18, 2011 12:00 A.M.

Obamacare’s Great Unraveling
It continues as the CLASS Act collides with accounting reality.

If only blinkered denial were a sound guide to policy. Then, Obamacare might be vindicating all the promises made on its behalf during the fevered push for its passage.

Alas, there’s no such place as the Big Rock Candy Mountain, where, as the hobo anthem has it, “the hens lay soft-boiled eggs” and “the handouts grow on bushes.”

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One of the law’s more blatant gimmicks just died after the administration ran smack into the adamantine rules of basic accounting, and one of the law’s central provisions might be overturned by the Supreme Court. The Obama administration’s signature legislative accomplishment is a standing testament to the foolishness of saying and doing anything to pass a bill as complex and sensitive as one remaking the American health-care system.
The expiring budgetary gimmick is the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports, or CLASS, Act. This new entitlement for long-term care was going to collect premiums for five years before paying out benefits. In the highly theoretical bookkeeping of the Congressional Budget Office, this made it a deficit-reduction measure; the program would collect $70 billion over the first ten years of Obamacare, the window for CBO estimates. Thereafter, it would pay out benefits at an unsustainable clip.
READ MORE: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/280402/obamacare-s-great-unraveling-rich-lowry
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com.

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Since taking office, Obama has invested billions of taxpayer dollars in private businesses, including as part of his stimulus spending bill. Many of those investments have turned out to be unmitigated disasters — leaving in their wake bankruptcies, layoffs, criminal investigations and taxpayers on the hook for billions...............Didn't think you were hiring a stock broker when you voted him in did you? Obama thinks your money is his to piss away on big likely to fail companies (more like funnels for cronies to sift dollars through the untraceable system of alternative energy company fronts) Where did the trillions go? He's still in office....THAT'S where the staggering amount of tax payer's dollars went: payoffs, bribes, organized mob scenes, extravagant daily life on top of wildly frequent vacations, just to mention a few.

Oh, and he pitches a baseball like a prissy, frail girl...