Recently, I co-authored a paper for the Heritage Foundation with Brian Riedl on the Community Living Assistance Service and Supports Act, or CLASS Act. The CLASS Act is a voluntary long-term care insurance program that hitched a ride on Obamacare. Here’s an excerpt from our Heritage paper:
…The Obama Administration and Congress chose to attach the CLASS Act to the broader health legislation for one reason only: It made the budget numbers look better on paper.
Budget gimmicks are sometimes relatively benign and inconsequential accounting tricks, but not so in this case. The CLASS Act hitched a ride on the health law to help hide the near-term budgetary costs of a major Medicaid expansion and a new subsidy program for health insurance. But in so doing, Congress created another ticking entitlement time bomb that is certain to explode on future taxpayers if not defused sooner rather than later.
The full paper is available online here, and a pdf version of it is available here.