One Provision of the Obamacare Fisaco is Being Abandoned

My official position on Obamacare is that it was largely a government subsidized giveaway to the various corporate interests involved in our increasingly broken health care system. The whole thing should be abolished because all it is accomplishing is placing us deeper in debt without really helping the tens of millions of uninsured Americans.

Well, just last week it was reported that one provision of Obamacare is about to fall by the wayside. Here is CBS News with the details:

The Obama administration says it is unable to go forward with a major program in the president's signature health care overhaul law — a new long-term care insurance plan.

Officials said Friday the long-term care program has critical design flaws that can't be fixed to make it financially self-sustaining.

So what kind of "critical design flaws" are we talking about here? The article continues:

CLASS was intended as a voluntary plan, supported by premiums, not taxpayer dollars. Workers would pay around $100 a month or less. In exchange, they would receive a modest daily cash benefit averaging no less than $50 if they became disabled later in life. Beneficiaries could use the money for services to help them stay at home, or to help with nursing home bills.

(Senator) Kennedy's idea was to give families some financial breathing room. The burden of long-term care is growing. Most families cannot afford to hire a home health aide for a frail elder, let alone pay nursing home bills. Long-term care is usually provided by family members, often a spouse who may also have health problems.

But a central design flaw dogged CLASS from the beginning. Unless large numbers of healthy people willingly sign up during their working years, soaring premiums driven by the needs of disabled beneficiaries would destabilize it, eventually requiring a taxpayer bailout.

Wow...that's just fucking brilliant. What genius working on the late Senator Kennedy's staff thought that there were tens of millions of people out there with an extra $100 a month to throw ON TOP of the already insanely high cost of their health insurance premiums? And notice how they were trying to obscure the fact that the amount of the payout should you be "lucky" enough to become disabled was a paltry $1500 a month by instead saying it was $50-a-day. Yet they were wondering why no one was willing to sign up for such a "great" deal.

I think the real problem here is that our so-called "leaders" and the minions who assist them in devising their nefarious schemes have absolutely no concept of how the average American lives their lives. That's the only explanation I can think of regarding how someone might think that a "mere" extra $100 a month should be no big deal even though the average household income is only $49,000 per year.

As I've said before, the real problem with health care is the corporate profits that have driven costs for even basic treatments up far beyond the ability of the average person to pay. Strip out the profits and those costs would become significantly lower. But the insurance, drug and hospital companies have become very adept with their propaganda at labeling any program that would accomplish such a thing as being "socialism."