Jonathan Gruber with one of his many white parrots
Video of MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber getting candid about Obamacare has been making the rounds today as it shows the law’s co-architect suggesting it only passed because of a lack of transparency and, perhaps, the “stupidity of the American voter.”
Gruber famously helped design former Gov. Mitt Romney‘s Massachusetts health care law and went on to become a key figure in constructing President Barack Obama‘s similar law, colloquially known as Obamacare. According to the New York Times, Gruber was paid $400,000 for his consulting work and directly aided congressional staffers in drafting the legislation.
Speaking before a University of Pennsylvania crowd at last year’s Annual Health Economists’ Conference, Gruber said the following about the health care law’s passage:
- "This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If [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 that 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. And it’s the second-best argument. Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not."
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 knowingly attempted to hide those consequences from the public.
Most importantly, however, it is an admission that Gruber thinks 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.
http://reason.com/blog/2014/11/10/watch ... than-grube