Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Jonathan Gruber
was, by most accounts, one of the key figures in constructing the
Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. He helped designed
the Massachusetts health care law on which it was modeled, assisted
the White House in laying out the foundation of the law, and,
according to The New York Times, was eventually sent
to Capitol Hill “to help Congressional staff members draft the
specifics of the legislation.” He provided the media with a stream
of supportive quotes, and was paid almost $400,000 for his
consulting work.
Jonathan Gruber, in other words, knows exactly what it took to
get the health care law passed.
And that’s why you should take him seriously when he says, in
the following video, that it was critical to not be transparent
about the law’s costs and true effects, and to take advantage of
the “stupidity of the American voter” in order to get it passed:
Here’s the full quote:
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did
not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO [Congressional Budget
Office] 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 validates much of what critics have said about the health
care law, and the tactics used to pass it, for years.
For one thing, it is an explicit admission that the law was
designed in such a way to avoid a CBO score that would have tanked
the bill. Basically, the Democrats who wrote the bill knowingly
gamed the CBO process.
It’s also an admission that the law’s authors understood that
one of the effects of the bill would be to make healthy people pay
for the sick, but declined to say this for fear that it would kill
the bill’s chances. In other words, the law’s supporters believed
the public would not like some of the bill’s consequences, and
attempted to hide that from the public.
Most importantly, however, it is an admission that Gruber
believes it’s acceptable to deceive people if he believes that’s
the only way to achieve his policy preference. That’s not exactly
surprising, given that he failed to disclose payments from the
administration to consult on Obamacare even while providing the
media with supposedly independent assessments of the law.
But it’s particularly revealing in light of Gruber’s recently
discovered comments regarding the way the law’s subsidies for
health insurance are supposed to work.
In a 2012 video unearthed this summer, Gruber said explicitly
that the tax credits to offset coverage costs were conditioned on
state participation in the law’s exchanges—a contention that the
administration denies, and is at the heart of a legal challenge on
its way to the Supreme Court.
Gruber, who by 2014 was making vehement arguments in support of
the administration’s position, said that in the video he misspoke.
That excuse was hard to believe. For one thing, he elaborated on
the argument at length, and for another, a second recording
surfaced soon after in which he said almost the exact same
thing.
It’s even harder to believe now that he has admitted that he
thinks it’s fine to mislead people if doing so bolsters the policy
goals he favors. It’s really quite telling. Gruber may believe that
American voters are stupid, but he was the one who was dumb enough
to say all this on camera.
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