ObamaCare Architect: American Voters Are Really, Really Stupid

Kudos to American Commitment for unearthing a 2013 video of ObamaCare architect and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber admitting that the truth about the legislation was withheld so that it could pass.

The Daily Signal sums up Gruber’s remarks:  

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” says the MIT economist who helped write Obamacare. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”

Hot Air summarizes Gruber’s remarks:

He tells the crowd that the bill was written to fake out the CBO — which is the Congress’ own analytical group. “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” Gruber tells the audience with a smile. “If CBO scores the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” The CBO did a lot more than just decide whether or not to score the mandate as a tax, though.

Democrats insisted that CBO’s initial scoring showed that the bill was deficit-neutral in its first ten years, thanks to transparently self-serving dodges like trawling revenue before making outlays a few years later. How much else did Democrats lie to get that initially positive scoring? How much else are Democrats still hiding about the ACA and the HHS implementation of it?

This is not Gruber’s first brush with inadvertent truth telling. He got caught on an earlier video admitting that the subsidy system was designed to force states onto the ObamaCare system. When caught, Gruber called this a “speak-o.”

Meanwhile, ObamaCare is headed back to the Supreme Court. At issue: the subsidies Gruber said would be a mechanism for forcing states into ObamaCare. As Hadley notes, this is “an existential threat” to ObamaCare.

ObamaCare survived a legal challenge that went all the way to the Supreme Court once, but an aspect of it didn’t fare as well with the Hobby Lobby opinion earlier this year. A ruling against the administration in the subsidies case would not only intrinsically harm ObamaCare but would trigger all sorts of other unpopular results.