On Dec. 19, 2009, days before the U.S. Senate passed its version of national health care legislation, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., claimed its long-term care program known as the CLASS Act was was “fully paid for” for decades.
“(The CLASS Act is) fully paid for, CBO said, in the far future, decades and decades into the future,” Reid insisted. “I didn’t use a penny of that money for the bill that’s before the Senate.”
Reid’s statement looks especially embarassing in the wake of the Obama administration’s acknowledgement that there was “no path forward” for the program, becuase it was fiscally unsustainable.
Yet even at the time, the statement wasn’t even remotely accurate. Just weeks before Reid made this claim, on Nov. 25, the CBO wrote that, “The CLASS program would add to budget deficits in future decades…” Furthermore, the CLASS Act’s phony short-term surpluses (created because it was to collect five years of premiums before paying out any benefits), accounted for about half of the deficit reduction Democrats claimed as part of Obamacare.
