On Friday, the stepchild of health reform died at the hands of the Obama administration, and the obits for the troubled long-term care program were mostly similar recitations of why the administration was not going forward to implement that portion of the Affordable Care Act, how it was part of Ted Kennedy’s legacy, and how gleeful Republicans were at its demise.

The media amply quoted Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Thune of South Dakota. Thune’s quote in The New York Times, “the Obama administration ignored repeated warnings about the financial solvency of this massive new entitlement,” gives a flavor of what they said.

The CLASS Act, short for the Community Living Assistance Services and Support Act, was a voluntary program where people could join a government plan to pre-fund some of the long-term care they might need in the future. Under the plan they would pay premiums during their working years. If they later became disabled and needed assistance, they would be entitled to a daily cash benefit of say, $50, that they could use to buy services such as a personal care attendant, home improvements that would let them stay in their house, or even to help pay nursing home costs.

Supporters saw the CLASS Act as a first step toward a national long-term care insurance program like those in other countries. Whatever its technical flaws, supporters argued that it would begin to solve the dilemma millions of families face—how to pay for a loved one’s care. Many politicians and the insurance industry weren’t keen on that idea since it could also be a first step to a publicly-financed insurance program (anathema to insurance sellers) and might cut into the market for long-term insurance, a product that has never really become a big seller primarily because of its high cost. The CLASS Act barely made it into the final bill.

Shortly after the health reform law cleared Congress, Medicare’s chief actuary Rick Foster warned that over the long term the CLASS Act may have been “unsustainable.” Because the program was voluntary, it depended on lots of healthy people signing up. That way the risk of insuring those likely to need care could be spread over a healthier population. But on Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius agreed with Foster and declared that there appeared to be no way to, as the reform law required, make the act actuarially sound over seventy-five years. The secretary did not have authority to change the act, but she had the task of making it sustainable, which she said could not be done. Sebelius noted that the premiums consumers would have to pay to join the plan ranged from $235 to $391 a month and perhaps as high as $3,000 under some scenarios. That was such a steep outlay that they might not enroll, causing the program to fall apart. Long-term care is expensive no matter who is providing the benefit—private insurers or the government—and that fact gets us into a discussion of social insurance with everyone in the risk pool, which I will save for another time.

Because budgets are the dominant story narrative out of Washington these days, it’s not surprising that the negative budget implication of ending the CLASS Act was as prominent a story line as those quotes from joyful Republicans. The program was supposed to reduce the federal deficit by $86 billion over ten years because people would be paying premiums and bringing new revenues into the program.

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