ObamaCare is great—but we’re just too stupid to realize it.

I think that is a not unfair précis of what Kathleen Sebelius, the former secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, who presided over ObamaCare’s disastrous rollout, told Susan Page of USA Today in an interview.

Page has asked Sebelius about ObamaCare and MIT professor Jonathan Gruber’s repeated remarks that ObamaCare passed because a “lack of transparency” (there is a three letter word for this) on the part of the supporters of ObamaCare. He also famously referred to the “stupidity” of the American taxpayer.

While denying that she knows Gruber or that he was an architect of ObamaCare,  Sebelius “sure did get a copy of his talking points” as Mary Katherine Ham puts it. Here is what the former HHS secretary said:

"A lot of Americans have no idea what insurance is about," she said. "I think the financial literacy of a lot of people, particularly people who did not have insurance coverage or whose employers chose their coverage and kind of present it to them, is very low — and that has been a sort of stunning revelation. It's not because people hid it from folks. It's because this is a complicated product."

Americans sure are stupid, aren’t they?

Ham comments:

Sebelius served as insurance commissioner for the state of Kansas before epically botching the roll-out of a federal entitlement program in historic and ostentatious fashion. So, she knows a thing or two, America.

Here’s the thing about Gruber and Sebelius. They decry the stupidity of Americans who have the temerity to express displeasure with their giant, ill-conceived, and iller-implemented social and policy engineering experiment. Americans just don’t understand the trade-offs, they say. Americans just don’t understand all the good stuff they’re getting. Americans just couldn’t be trusted with the truth of what we were passing because we had to force them into what’s best for them. But Americans, as they have shown in poll after poll after poll, have seen through all of this every single step of the way. They’ve had the architects and the bureaucrats pegged from Day One, and the architects and the bureaucrats are none too happy about it.

And here’s one more thing about Gruber and Sebelius. The American people, though wise enough to spot this lemon coming off the lot, are a generous folk. They might, indeed, have warmed to the law a bit if it had been executed competently, if the interface for exchanges was as elegant and user-friendly as, say, Obama’s campaign website, if disruption had been manageable, managed smartly, and damage minimized, they might have given Gruber and Sebelius and Obamacare yet another chance. (I would have advised against this, but the American people are more generous than I.)

Guess whose job it was to get all of that right? The architects and the bureaucrats— the people who know so much better than we do.