Finally, an opportunity to recycle one of my favorite jokes from the classic Fat Albert show!  The Community Living  Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) program was part of the health care reform bill and attempted to create a new entitlement for government sponsored long term care insurance (if you need a quote for LTC insurance, call me).  Great idea, right!  

The government thought so.  The plan was to have the current premiums paid by new enrollees to cover the cost of the care provided with little or no subsidy.  Sounds familiar doesn't it?  WSJ continues: 

As the costs to the federal fisc continued to climb, the Democratic gambit was that Class would gradually morph into another part of Medicare. Insurance depends on younger, healthier people signing up to cross-subsidize the older and sicker, but under the Class program as written almost all of its enrollees would soon also be beneficiaries.

So to fix this "adverse selection," the plan was for Congress to eventually make participation mandatory, with the so-called premiums converted into another payroll tax and the benefits into another entitlement. Former White House budget director Peter Orszag has been writing that the long-term care insurance market can't function without a mandate, while HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declined to rule one out at a Senate hearing in February. Now they tell us.

This sounds like every other entitlement, including Obamacare.  So, why are they canceling the program?  Has common sense broken out in HHS?

The only reason the Health and Human Services Department pre-emptively called off this scheme is that former New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg succeeded in inserting a proviso that required the Class program's reality to match Democratic promises as a matter of law. If HHS couldn't provide "an actuarial analysis of the 75-year costs of the program that ensures solvency throughout such 75-year period," it couldn't be legally implemented.

In other words, HHS had to prove that the Class program wouldn't go broke the way it was designed to—and actuarial analysis is a matter of math, not politics. In a 48-page report that HHS submitted to Congress Friday, the department concedes that it is literally impossible to create any kind of long-term care program under the law's statutory text in which revenues match expenditures. Such a plan would cost as much as $3,000 per month, which no one would ever buy.

We need one of those provisos added to Obamacare as a whole!  The WSJ calls for exactly that:

Our suggestion is for a Gregg-like amendment that applies to the entire health law and not simply Class. If reality can't match the rhetoric that accompanied the bill—about fiscal responsibility, bending the cost curve, keeping your health care if you like your health care and all the other false promises—then, legally, it should be repealed like Class. Call it a truth-in-advertising clause. ObamaCare would collapse in a heartbeat.

Who will be the first GOP presidential contender to call for this?

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