Sen. John Thune (R-SD) tried unsuccessfully Wednesday to get a Senate vote on his bill to repeal the CLASS Act. HHS has already pulled the plug on the program as fiscally irredeemable, and Wednesday's failure aside, repeal remains the smart thing to do.

The Senate floor discussion Wednesday (Congressional Record excerpts, Kaiser Health News summary) featured a fair dose of parliamentary maneuvering and partisan positioning, but the bottom line is that the CLASS Act is fundamentally flawed. This is the program included in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act meant to create long-term care program for home care of the disabled and others, financed by individual premiums. But the health care bill called for five years of premium payments before services would ever start, making the legislation appear more fiscally responsible than it was/is.

In mid-October, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced she was shelving the program because there was no way to make it actuarially sound. (Business Roundtable Today blog: "Pulling plug on CLASS Act best move for health care.") Actuarial soundness is a basic problem for business groups like BRT, which also objected to the automatic employee sign-up program administered by employers. Indeed, Business Roundtable and other major business and insurance groups joined in April this year in endorsing legislation to halt the program. The issues surrounding long-term care, home care, and care for the disabled are many and legitimate, but the CLASS Act law is beyond repair. Why keep it in the statute books?

The debate over the CLASS Act recalls the 2010-2011 efforts to repeal the 1099 filing requirement under the Affordable Care Act, a provision that would have produced a revenue stream for the new health care programs by requiring businesses to file withholding forms for every transaction they had with suppliers that topped $600 -- an expensive, burdensome imposition on businesses, especially small business. While some lawmakers sought to modify the law -- to keep the money flowing while easing the political pressure -- Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE) worked for its repeal. Months later, the bad law's repeal was signed into law by President Obama.

Going through the same kind of time-consuming machinations to get rid of the CLASS Act makes no sense. Congress should just repeal it.