The new American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (ATRA) – the fiscal cliff act — will repeal the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act and replace it with a new long-term care (LTC) commission.
The commission is supposed to include representatives of users and sellers of private long-term care insurance (LTCI), and it's supposed to try to come up with recommendations within six months after it sets to work.
The House and Senate majority leaders are supposed to introduce bills based on the recommendations. There's no guarantee whatsoever that congressional leaders will get the bills through committees, let alone to the House or Senate floor.
Howard Gleckman, an LTC expert, is suggesting in Forbes that the LTC commission may simply perform a study that will gather dust on a bookshelf somewhere.
But, on the other hand: At least President Obama and Republican negotiators took the time to think a little about LTC finance when they were hammering out the fiscal cliff deal.
U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius suspended implementation of the CLASS program — a voluntary LTC benefits program designed by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy — more than a year ago, after she acknowledged that there was no way that she could guarantee that the CLASS program would be sustainable.
Obama and the Republican negotiators could have simply killed the act and moved on. It seems as if that's what they're trying to do with any future HHS efforts to fund the birth of Consumer Operated and Coordinated Plan (CO-OP) carriers. ATRA does not contain a CO-OP commission consolation prize provision. It does contain an LTC commission provision.
Republicans and Democrats may not quite agree on much, other than that they don't want the futures market, bond market and stock market to rip the country apart Quentin Tarantino style, but it seems as if they do agree that the aging of the members of the Silent Generation and the baby boom generation matters.
Waiting until the last minute to keep the nation from going over the silver cliff is a bad idea
Maybe Congress can solve a tug of war over the estate tax and the top marginal tax rates for billionaires who've parked most of their wealth in a private bank domiciled on Neptune with a few all-nighters and a barrage of cold pizza.
The silver cliff is a tougher cliff. To keep us from going over that cliff, policymakers will have to get work ahead of time.
If there's even a vague bipartisan understanding that the silver cliff is a scary cliff, maybe that all by itself could be a reason to have (a little) hope.
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