If American voters weren’t so stupid, Obamacare never would have been able to pass the halls of Congress, the White House and the U.S. Supreme Court, says one of the key creators of the law.
Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who served as a technical consultant to the White House during the design of Obamacare, confirmed in a recently released video that one of the key problems with Obamacare’s development was making sure its text was confusing enough so that the Congressional Budget Office wouldn’t automatically deem it a tax, The Daily Caller reported.
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” he said during a panel discussion at the Annual Health Economists’ Conference last year. “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.”
The Supreme Court ultimately gave the thumbs-up to the law, but based on the argument that it was in fact a tax. And for that, Mr. Gruber credited the “stupidity” of the average American, as well as the “lack of transparency” of the whole Obamacare process.
“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 … we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.