The failure of one program shows the soundess of the rest.
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The administration tried to bury the news Friday that it was abandoning CLASS, the long-term care program in Obama’s health care law. But critics of the Affordable Care Act were all over it; today’s Wall Street Journal announced that the law is “starting to unravel.” But is it? The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn admits that the program was unsustainable from the beginning, something liberals shouldn’t have ignored. But one reason was that the administration decided to make it voluntary, which strangled its ability to raise revenue. It was a bad idea the Obama team was never crazy about, but its failure proves the rest of the law got it right—the individual mandate is an absolute necessity for healthcare reform to work.
