MIT professor and PPACA technical advisor Jonathan Gruber made the news this week in just about the worst possible way (Hey, at least he's not Bill Cosby).
There is much more to it, but in short, Gruber got caught on video not once, but twice, disparaging American voters.
In the first bit that lit the Internet – and Fox News – on fire, Gruber spoke at an academic conference in October 2013 about the strategy behind the way PPACA was drafted.
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"This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes," Gruber explained in the clip. "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."
But before the smoke could clear, word came out of a second Gruber video, around the same time, where he addressed the Cadillac tax.
"They proposed it and that passed," Gruber says in the clip, "because the American people are too stupid to understand the difference."
I don't have the raw video of that one, but here's the Megyn Kelly bit where she breaks the story.
Now, I know everyone in the media's declaring this guy the architect of PPACA, but it's worth keeping some perspective in mind. Did he sit down and write all 906 pages of PPACA? Of course not, but you can be damn sure he was in the room when all the brainstorming went down. And after advising officials in Massachusetts when they first took the plunge into health care reform, there's little doubt this guy knows what he was doing.
I believe every word he says in these videos (and that's important to remember). I believe he and everyone else involved in this legislation drafted, marketed and implemented this law very strategically. Whether that strategy was very good or not remains debatable.
Side note: This is eerily reminiscent of Romney's remarks caught on video at a private fund-raiser during the last presidential election. (Maybe it's something in the Boston tea.)
"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what," Romney told boosters. "All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax."
Romney got hammered for these remarks, and it could be argued, it cost him the election. So it's important not to cut Gruber any slack here. These remarks are moronic, insidious and speak to a level of arrogance and disdain for the rest of us that is almost certainly not limited to a single party. I would argue this hubris is one of the few bipartisan things left in this country and permeates every political office in and around the Beltway.
But this isn't even the best part.
It hasn't made the news because it not nearly as sensational, but yet another Gruber video reveals the administration – along with Congressional Democrats – actually did know what they were doing when they drafted the subsidy language as related to the federal vs. state exchanges.
Back in 2012, Gruber said, "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—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 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. But, you know, once again the politics can get ugly around this."
You can find the entire presentation here.
This is far more damning than insulting average Americans. This reveals PPACA's authors are lying now when it comes to referring to this language as typo. It's enough to not only piss me off, but reverse my position on King v. Burwell. And I hope to hell the court tosses the subsidies and send lawmakers scurrying like cockroaches across the freshly lit kitchen tile.
I'm through with the lot of them.
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