Political Quotes

“Madam President, I rise to speak to an issue that I think has been on the minds of a lot of people here and hopefully people across this country too; that is, this failed CLASS Act Program, which last week we finally got some--I would characterize it as good news because I think this is a program that was destined to fail. On Friday last week, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius came out and said: Despite our best analytical efforts, I do not see a path forward for CLASS implementation at this time. Essentially, what came with that and what accompanied that was a big volume of analysis that had been done that essentially supports the conclusion that it doesn't add up. We can't make the math work. I think that is something that hopefully my colleagues, as what we know now, will recognize; that we ought to eliminate and we ought to repeal this CLASS Act once and for all. That is something I tried to do as we were debating the health care bill almost 2 years ago. I offered an amendment in December of 2009 that would repeal the CLASS Act, believing at the time it wasn't going to work. We had, at that time, plenty of evidence to that effect. Unfortunately, it was included as a part of the health care reform bill to help pay for it. At that time, it was estimated it would generate about $70 billion in revenue to be used to offset the cost of the health care bill or at least to put it in balance and to claim there was some deficit reduction associated with it.…”