Obamacare Architect: We Passed the Law Thanks to the ‘Stupidity of the American Voter’
One of the architects of Obamacare said the law was written in a deliberately “tortured” way and relied on the “stupidity of the American voter” to ensure its passage.In a newly unearthed 2013 clip, Jonathan Gruber, the MIT health economist who helped craft parts of the Affordable Care Act, got fairly candid about the tactics used to get the Affordable Care Act passed during a panel at the Annual Health Economists’ Conference last year.
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes,” Gruber said in one 52-second clip. “If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. OK, 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.”
Gruber then trumpeted the value of a “lack of transparency” — and called American voters stupid.
“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber said. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass.”
Better for the American people to be saddled with a law they don’t understand, Gruber claimed, than for them to understand the law and rally against it.
“Look, I wish … we could make it all transparent,” Gruber said, “but I’d rather have this law than not.”
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