Jonathan Gruber
Outrage is growing over a newly released video of ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber, speaking at a 2013 event at the University of Pennsylvania, in which he said the controversial health care law was written in such a way so as to take advantage of “the stupidity of the American voter.”
Fox News is reporting on the statements made by Gruber, the MIT professor who served as a technical consultant to the Obama administration during ObamaCare’s design. The comments were made during the 24th Annual Health Economics Conference at the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute (LDI) of Health Economics on 17-18 October 2013.
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” Gruber admits in the 52 second soundbite.
“If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass… Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”
This isn’t the first time Gruber made comments about the law that got the administration in trouble. In 2012, he clearly stated that only residents using state-run exchanges can qualify for tax subsidies.
“I think what’s important to remember politically about this, is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an Exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits,” Gruber said. “But your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying to your citizens, ‘you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country’. I hope that’s a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these Exchanges, and that they’ll do it.”
Comments such as this one, especially when stated by a major contributor to the health care law, could jeopardize the government’s case next year when the Supreme Court hears a challenge to the law on the issue of whether or not the law states that only residents of state-run exchanges qualify for subsidies.
Even though the law clearly states this, the government says it’s the equivalent of a “typo” and that the authors clearly meant to include everyone in the subsidies. This is debatable, especially in light of Gruber’s comments suggesting the government withheld the subsidies as a way to “bribe” states into setting up exchanges. Only 17 complied, which forced the government to authorize itself to extend the subsidies to federal exchanges because it would be the only way millions of lower- and middle-class Americans could afford the pricey health care options offered on the exchanges. Without these subsidies, the law will go into what experts call a “death spiral” with millions of people being unable to afford health insurance.
The Supreme Court is expected to hear the case in March and will issue a ruling in June, 2015.
However, the arrogance of Gruber’s latest conundrum has sparked a new wave of outrage across the country, which is why the University of Pennsylvania hurriedly removed the video after it was posted on YouTube.
But the damage has already been done.
“This is a jaw dropping disclosure of the political lengths those in the Obama Administration were willing to go to avoid the hard truths about their signature legislative achievement,” said Curtis Kalin of CNS News.
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