Zombie Budget Gimmick Continues to Lurch Forward After Death

CLASS is dead. Long live CLASS.

Last week, I took a look at why ObamaCare's gimmicky long-term care benefit, the Community Living Assisted Services and Supports (CLASS) Act, is so hard to kill—despite the fact that even its backers in the administration have admitted that it's totally unsustainable. In short? The program has been shut down. But the administration won't admit that it's been shut down because if they did, they'd lose roughly $80 billion of ObamaCare's deficit reduction.

Here's the AP, which originally broke the news that the administration was aware of the program's flaws long before it passed, with a follow-up on the zombie program:

They're calling it the zombie in the budget.

It's a long-term care plan the Obama administration has put on hold, fearing it could go bust if actually implemented. Yet while the program exists on paper, monthly premiums the government may never collect count as reducing federal deficits.

Real or not, that's $80 billion over the next 10 years.

The Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program, CLASS for short, may just keep lurching along indefinitely. It would join other peculiar creatures of the federal budget such as "trust funds" that are actually more like IOUs and Medicare cuts that can be counted twice.

"It's a gimmick that produces phantom savings," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that advocates deficit control.

"That money should have never been counted as deficit reduction because it was supposed to be set aside to pay for benefits," Bixby added. "The fact that they're not actually doing anything with the program sort of compounds the gimmick."

Much more on CLASS here.