Saturday, October 15, 2011

Long-Term Care Insurance - Gone!

Very interesting article from The Washington Post online - interesting from an insurance perspective, and from the perspective of how Washington plays its game.

The Obama administration has eliminated the long-term care insurance program from the 2010 health care law.

"The program was to be entirely self-financed with the premiums participants paid. Obama officials said that presented them with a problem: If they designed a benefits package generous enough to meet the law’s requirements, they would have had to set premiums so high that few healthy people would enroll. And without a large share of healthy people in the pool, the CLASS plan would have become even more expensive, forcing the government to raise premiums even higher, to the point of the program’s collapse."

As the article says, this will also affect deficit-reduction plans associated with the health-care law.

- Rick

Monday, October 10, 2011

Nobel Winner - Short and Sweet

Here is a graduation speech by one of today's two Nobel prize winners in economics, Thomas Sargent. Given at UC Berkeley in 2007, it is very short and a nice summary of some of what we know about economics.

- Rick