Kansas Health Institute | Information For Policy Makers. Health for Kansans.

TOPEKA — A long-term care insurance program built into the national health reform law can be fixed and shouldn’t be repealed, according to the head of a group that represents nonprofit nursing homes in Kansas.

Deb Zehr, president of the Kansas Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, said she hoped the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act program can be made financially sustainable.

She said if a way can be found to ensure that enough people enroll in the voluntary program before they need nursing home care, it could soon have sufficient funds to help aging baby boomers pay for in-home and nursing home care. That would prevent many from having to eventually rely on Medicaid, she said.

“We can’t keep using Medicaid as the nation’s default long-term care insurance program,” Zehr said.

Medicaid, jointly funded by the federal and state governments, provides health coverage for low-income and disabled persons. The Kansas program costs about $2.8 billion a year. Aging Kansans in nursing homes constitute a small percentage of Medicaid enrollees, but it costs more to serve them than others in the program.

On Friday, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the agency had decided not to implement the CLASS program because of projections indicating it wouldn’t be financially sustainable.

“Despite our best analytical efforts, I do not see a viable path forward for CLASS implementation at this time,” Sebelius said in a letter to congressional leaders.

But that doesn’t mean the administration supports repealing the long-term care program, which is part of the Affordable Care Act. On Monday, White House spokesman Nick Papas said it wasn’t “necessary or productive” to yield to Republican attempts to repeal the long-term care program.

“What we should be doing is working together to address the long-term care challenges we face in this country,” Papas said.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was quick to criticize the administration’s position.

“It defies logic for the White House to admit this part of their health spending bill would put an unsustainable burden on taxpayers, yet demand that it stay on the books,” McConnell said in a report published by the Huffington Post.

Zehr said the political back-and-forth was perplexing.

“To say there’s been some confusion about what’s coming out of the administration is correct,” she said in an interview. “We are working with our national association to try to figure out what’s going on. But we support this concept, and we’re not giving up.”

The best-case scenario for the CLASS Act appears to be putting it on hold until after the 2012 election, which, in part, is expected to be a referendum on the health reform law.

Efforts to repeal the CLASS Act were dealt a setback recently when the Congressional Budget Office reported that taking a program that isn’t being implemented off the books would have no impact on the deficit.

When the health reform bill was being debated, the CBO said the CLASS program would save the federal government approximately $80 billion during the period when premiums were being collected but no benefits were being paid. However, recent reports predicted the program would run into financial trouble when demand for benefits exceeded funding available to pay them.