Friday brought news that has conservatives wearing smiles and liberals sporting frowns. Too bad the human mouth doesn't readily express both emotions at the same time, because that's the better response to the CLASS Act's death.
The conservatives have the stronger case. The CLASS Act was a federal "toe in the water" of the urgent issue of long-term care. If you had paid your premiums for at least five years, it would have helped you stay in your home (and out of a nursing home) while coping with a disability.
But the numbers never added up. Federal officials couldn't figure out how to avoid "adverse selection" -- that is, the likelihood that sick people would have bought the insurance while healthy people avoided it, thus making payouts soar past premiums.
And if the story ended there, then Friday's action would be nothing more than a federal agency correcting a mistake. But it doesn't end there because the act was pitched as a deficit-reduction provision of the Obama administration's health care reform.
Exactly how do planners sell a wildly unsustainable program as reducing the deficit? By collecting premiums for five years before paying out any benefits, thus gaming the Congressional Budget Office's 10-year deficit accounting.
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That's how. No wonder "House Republicans announced late Friday that they will be holding a hearing to find out why it took so long" for the administration to nix the CLASS Act, The Hill reported.
The trouble is that the act's demise -- as right and proper as it is -- leaves the problem of long-term care unaddressed. Ask any family with an aging parent, and they'll agree: There is no more pressing problem facing baby boomers than paying for long-term care.
"By now, you may be wondering if your parents have a half million dollars for old age," New York Times columnist Jane Brody wrote recently.
"Or if you or your children do. You may be counting on quick and easy deaths: Shoot me, so many people say.
"Alas, 70 percent of the elderly will need extended care before they die. Denial is powerful but doesn't pay the bills."
Private insurance is available, but it's so expensive and uncertain that only 10 percent of the elderly have a private long-term care plan.
What's needed is not a government mandate, but "a combination of penalties and rewards that might encourage people to buy insurance at a relatively young age," as Howard Gleckman, columnist for Forbes magazine, recently wrote.
That's not an impossible dream. The government already uses tax incentives to encourage people to save for retirement, for example.
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Something similar can and should be done to prompt more people -- many millions more -- to buy long-term care insurance.
"Advocates ... must sit down and work out a consensus plan," Gleckman wrote.
"After the CLASS fiasco, it should be clear that if people who care about long-term care issues don't act quickly, this issue will end up back in the closet. And that would be a personal and financial disaster for tens of millions of Americans and their families."
