Word: classing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...program - called the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act - would be funded by premiums and would pay enrollees $50 or more per day if they became too disabled to perform normal daily activities like eating and bathing. Employers who chose to participate would sign up their employees, who would then have the ability to opt out. The cash benefits could be applied to nursing-home care, but in an effort to encourage enrollees to stay in their own homes, payouts could cover such things as wheelchair ramps and wages for home health care aides...
While everyone agrees that allowing elderly and disabled Americans to stay in their homes is better from a fiscal standpoint, certain details of the CLASS Act have made it an easy target for critics. Examining the merits of these criticisms provides a window to understanding both the complexity of health care reform and why it's so ripe for mischaracterization. For instance, to prevent people from purchasing long-term-care coverage when they are already in need, the CLASS Act requires that enrollees be employed and pay into the system for five years before becoming eligible to collect benefits...
...opponents are just as guilty of fiscal shenanigans. It's true, as Thune pointed out, that the CBO says the CLASS Act will increase budget deficits in the long term, but that's only because of the peculiar way the deficit is calculated. Premiums collected would be invested in federal securities, and when the interest earned is transferred back to the CLASS Act trust fund, the transaction would be recorded as an increase in the deficit. The Senate bill also requires that the CLASS Act trust fund be solvent over a 75-year period, and the bill would give...
Still, Republicans are not the only ones protesting the CLASS Act on the grounds that it won't work financially. In October, seven Democrats wrote to Senate majority leader Harry Reid urging him to exclude the CLASS Act - already included in the passed House health reform bill - from the Senate's legislation, saying they had "grave concerns that [the CLASS Act would] create a new federal entitlement program with large, long-term spending increases that far exceed revenues." The chief actuary for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services wrote that the CLASS Act provisions in the House bill...
...much more conflictive because of Evo," says Ximena Delvillar, 36, who lives in a relatively affluent section of La Paz. Bolivia, in fact, seemed on the verge of a civil war last year between the indigenous people and the white economic élite of the Eastern lowlands. That upper class is hardly blameless, but even Bolivians sympathetic to Morales complain that he and MAS have consolidated inordinate power and are wielding it with a vengeance against political foes. Several opposition leaders are under seemingly arbitrary investigation for financial fraud, illegal land holdings or ties to a supposed terrorist cell...