The House GOP’s vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s long-term care program isn’t sitting well with Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), who is out with an op-ed in Politico this morning, criticizing Republicans for failing to offer any meaningful solution for financing long-term care services. “They view repealing CLASS as a tactical step toward undermining health care reform – without putting forward any real alternatives for families who have nowhere to turn,” he writes:

Repealing CLASS won’t do anything to solve our nation’s long-term care crisis. Legislation rarely starts out perfectly – indeed, the Republicans’ own Medicare prescription drug bill left a huge coverage gap, forcing seniors to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket. It is only because Democrats rejected the ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater’ approach to legislating, and figured out a solution, that this gap will finally be closed and seniors can save millions on prescription drugs.

Lawmakers had designed CLASS to take the strain off of Medicaid — which finances more than half of long-term care — and allow individuals to establish a cash benefit during their working years that would be available if they become disabled. As Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) explained during a Energy & Commerce health subcommittee hearing, “It was very much a notion of personal responsibility and not relying on the government.” But since the administration decided that Secretary Kathleen Sebelius did not have the necessary authority to bring the program in compliance with the health care law’s sustainability provision, the GOP chose to repeal the measure rather than act like lawmakers and actually work to ensure its longevity. The move is calculated to hurt Obama, but will do nothing to address the long-term care time-bomb:

Last night, Sen. John Thune (R-SD) — the sponsor of the Senate bill to repeal the CLASS Act — offered a unanimous consent request to advance a measure that would eliminate the long-term care program to the Senate floor, but was met with an objection from Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV). The West Virginian insisted that the country needs a more sustainable long-term care system and argued that it could be “amended through the legislative process to make it sustainable over the long term”:

ROCKEFELLER: Always our friends on the other side of the aisle appeal something. You can lead people to the same sense of suffering as we found during the pepper commission where people prostrate themselves in order to qualify for medicaid, in which they haven’t a chance at getting some long-term care. [...] Those who are gloating today about the administration’s decision not to carry forward with the class act are not the fiscal heroes they make themselves out to be. They have no answers. They have no answers. They have no alternative.

Watch it:

President Obama’s new deficit reduction plan attempts to address concerns that blending the federal reimbursement rates for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) would shift too much costs to the states by delaying its implementation until 2017 and producing a modest amount of savings relative to earlier versions of the plan. But some in Congress are still concerned that the greater cost shift to states would undermine the programs. Sen. Jay Rockefller (D-WV) — a strong proponent of both the Medicaid and CHIP — denounced the Obama’s modified blended rate proposal yesterday, saying it would devastate CHIP:

The proposal doesn’t specifically call for ending CHIP. But Rockefeller said that’s what would happen because CHIP would be a program where states could cut. Rockefeller was asked about the blended rate proposal when he stopped to talk to reporters after the Senate Democrats’ policy lunch Tuesday. “I hate it,” he said. Asked whether he still thinks it would kill CHIP, a prediction he made when the blended rate idea was floated earlier this year, Rockefeller said “it will do a very good job of that. Yeah, that would be my guess. Governors love CHIP until they have to start paying more for it.”

While the administration claims a blended rate would streamline and simplify the reimbursement formulas, states would receive less under a blended rate proposal because the federal government would average the reimbursement rates for all populations into a single rate. Rockefeller and other Medicaid advocates worry that this could signal the beginning of the end for CHIP. The Affordable Care Act requires states to maintain their current CHIP enrollment through 2019, but as CQ’s John Reichard reports, it “only funds them through 2015,” thus setting “the stage for a debate that year about how well the exchanges are doing in providing coverage and whether CHIP is really needed.”

Rockefeller characterized Obama’s cuts to Medicare and Medicaid as “hard” on seniors and the poor and said he would rather raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans. “You have to raise taxes. It isn’t a question of being a Democrat or of being a liberal. Or not being liberal. It’s just math,” he told Reichard.

Out of the many troubling health care repeal amendments in the Korean trade agreement, Sen. Orrin Hatch’s (R-UT) proposal to repeal the maintenance of effort provision for the Medicaid program — which requires states to maintain their enrollment numbers or risk losing federal funding — is possibly the most egregious. It encompasses the Republican approach of “saving” the program by forcing more people off of it — no matter the consequences to the beneficiaries.

As Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) pointed out in a recent letter to Hatch, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the provision would result in substantial coverage erosion for children in the CHIP program:

– By 2013, 400,000 people will lose their Medicaid and CHIP coverage. Two thirds of those dropped from coverage will be children.

– Half of all states will end their CHIP programs by 2016. One quarter of states are expected to end their program even earlier, in 2015, while remaining CHIP programs are expected to scale back coverage.

– By 2016, the number of those expected to lose CHIP coverage will climb to 1.7 million people, with 700,000 left uninsured.

Interestingly, as a long-time proponent of extending health care coverage to children and a co-sponsor of the original CHIP bill in 1997, the Hatch of yesteryear would have opposed these cuts. Here he is in 2006, praising the program on its 10-year anniversary: “When we drafted this legislation in 1997, our goal was to cover the several million children who had no insurance coverage. We have gone a long way in meeting that goal, but we are clearly not there yet. Coverage of these uninsured children should still be our top priority.”