Courtesy of Mish.
The truth on Obamacare is finally out: The bill was purposely written to trick the CBO (congressional Budget Office) into believing the bill was not a tax. Moreover, the bill also depended on the “Stupidity of the American Voter”.
Many of us knew that long ago. But those are the words of Jonathan Gruber, a numbers wizard at M.I.T., who was courted by the Obama administration, and paid $400,000 for his efforts to see that the bill made its way through Congressional obstacles.
The following short video explains the setup.
Academic Case
Back in 2012, regarding Gruber’s role in getting the bill passed, the New York Times wrote Academic Built Case for Mandate in Health Care Law.
Interestingly, Gruber was also the architect for Romneycare when Mitt Romney was Massachusetts governor.
Romney was proud of Romneycare until president Obama endorsed virtually the same idea as Obamacare. Romney then ran against his own creation. Lovely.
I picked up the video above from Reason.Com Watch Obamacare Architect Jonathan Gruber Explain Why “Lack of Transparency” Was Key to Passing the Health Care Law.
Complete Quote
Gruber: “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.”
Reason says (and I wholeheartedly agree) …
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.
…
