Posted on 11/14/2014 7:04:08 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Earlier this week, the Daily Caller found videos of economist Jonathan Gruber, who helped write the Affordable Care Act, committing gaffes. Conservatives have responded with wild anger at what they take to be a confession that the hated law was designed to fool the public. Gruber “said that lack of transparency was a major part of getting ObamaCare passed, and that it was written in such a way as to take advantage of ‘the stupidity of the American voter,’” cries Fox News. The right-wing media is treating Gruber’s comments as a “scandal” and even proposing possible hearings in Congress. The furor over Gruber’s comments is based mostly on a simple misunderstanding, but there is enough truth in conservative claims about what he said to draw the mainstream media into the outrage.
Here is what Gruber said. Unlike some other transcripts, I am leaving in his stammering, because it helps clarify the context of his meaning:
This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. So it’s written to do that.
In terms of risk-rated subsidies, in a law that said health people are gonna pay in — if it made explicit that healthy people are gonna pay in, sick people get money, it would not have passed. Okay — just like the … people — transperen— 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 to get anything to pass.
(Excerpt) Read more at nymag.com ...
Here’s the author’s defense of Gruber regarding the words that angered many people: “The stupidity of the American People”
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Since people know so little about public policy in general and health-care policy in particular, they tend to have incoherent views. In health care and other areas, they want to enjoy generous benefits while paying low taxes and dont know enough details to reconcile those irreconcilable preferences. Grubers error here is that, by describing this as stupidity rather than a lack of knowledge, he moves from lamenting an unfortunate problem both parties must work around to condescending to the public in an unattractive way.
Ah, the old “What’s the big deal you provincial morons?” defense.
I knew it would rear it’s ugly head.
The author of this piece of garbage is every bit as contemptuous, condescending and sanctimonious as Mr. Gruber.
Gruber purposely misled and confused the CBO and the American people for this thing to pass. Period.
He should be fired by MIT, promptly.
Here’s the author’s defense of Gruber:
Gruber is merely pointing out that supporters of the law took pains to design its mandate so that the Congressional Budget Office would not define it as a tax. At worst, this was spin. At best, this a perfectly accurate way to sell the individual mandate as a fine on free-riding behavior, like parking without feeding the meter, as opposed to a levy designed mainly for revenue.
In the midst of Gruber and Obamacare’s richly deserved comeuppance I should like to point out that the economics and logistics and of the plan were obvious and inevitable to anyone motivated and intelligent enough to grasp them from the off.
None of the finite resources, materials, manpower involved in health care nor insurance are free therefore Gruber’s rationale, however ‘controversial,’ is self-evident. Government will ration because it must ration, especially when the aforementioned resources vanish from the market due to a loss of profit motive.
The entire piece was written to parse Gruber’s words in a tortured manner in order to JUSTIFY THEM.
Here’s his tortured defense of the NON-TRANSPARENCY statement of Gruber:
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Here is where media reports have most badly bungled Grubers point. They have treated his line about transparency as if he were describing the entire process of writing and passing the law. Media coverage has compounded the misimpression by cutting out the stammering in his remarks about transparency, treating each of them as a stand-alone thought. Even MSNBC played an edited version that began Grubers remarks with Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage ...
But Gruber was not talking about passing the law in a non-transparent fashion. Conservatives believe the law was passed non-transparently, but nobody who supported it considers this anything but a bizarre description of one of the most drawn-out public and legislative debates in the history of Congress. Gruber was surely referring to the non-transparent mechanism of regulating insurance companies, causing them to charge less to the sick and more to the healthy, without Congress having to carry out those transfers through direct taxes.
Gruber is right about this, too. Suppose Congress had decided not to regulate insurers but instead charged higher taxes to healthy people, and wrote checks directly to sick people. People would have hated it, even though the popular mechanism Congress used instead does the very same thing.
LIES are evil!
Here in this article, and the one posted immediately after it, we have the MSM in typical mode - circling their wagons around the White House instead of acting as “watchdog.” They are turning the thing around and slamming the critics instead of the administration.
” He should be fired by MIT, promptly.”
I guess you are not familiar with Cambridge, Mass. They are still trying to impeach Nixon, posthumously : )
Oh believe me I neither endorse Gruber’s views, his syntax nor the writer’s ideological allegiance.
I also reject the Mom-baseball-and-apple-pie treatment given to previous redistributionist schemes.
Medical costs are inflated because of government interference in the marketplace. It is madness to suggest that additional government interference will somehow solve those problems.
Despite the “stupidity of the American people”, Obamacare was passed with the majority of Americans opposing it.
Is someone in a Republican administration had been caught admitting this kind of deception, would Chait be writing this kind of defense? No way in hell. Everything Bush said was nitpicked and misrepresented.
What is evil is a congress that passed a law they didn’t write and didn’t read.
This is banana republic stuff, where el comandante rules by decree and the pantomime congress ratifies his every hiccup and burp.
This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. So its written to do that.
Justice Roberts said it was a TAX, not a fine. They did not just spin it, they tried to lie. The SCOTUS called them out on it.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You were against the individual mandate…
OBAMA: Yes.
STEPHANOPOULOS: …during the campaign. Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax?
OBAMA: Well, hold on a second, George. Here — here’s what’s happening. You and I are both paying $900, on average — our families — in higher premiums because of uncompensated care. Now what I’ve said is that if you can’t afford health insurance, you certainly shouldn’t be punished for that. That’s just piling on. If, on the other hand, we’re giving tax credits, we’ve set up an exchange, you are now part of a big pool, we’ve driven down the costs, we’ve done everything we can and you actually can afford health insurance, but you’ve just decided, you know what, I want to take my chances. And then you get hit by a bus and you and I have to pay for the emergency room care, that’s…
STEPHANOPOULOS: That may be, but it’s still a tax increase.
OBAMA: No. That’s not true, George. The — for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase. People say to themselves, that is a fair way to make sure that if you hit my car, that I’m not covering all the costs.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But it may be fair, it may be good public policy…
OBAMA: No, but — but, George, you — you can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase. Any…
STEPHANOPOULOS: Here’s the…
OBAMA: What — what — if I — if I say that right now your premiums are going to be going up by 5 or 8 or 10 percent next year and you say well, that’s not a tax increase; but, on the other hand, if I say that I don’t want to have to pay for you not carrying coverage even after I give you tax credits that make it affordable, then…
STEPHANOPOULOS: I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”
OBAMA: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition. I mean what…
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, no, but…
OBAMA: …what you’re saying is…
STEPHANOPOULOS: I wanted to check for myself. But your critics say it is a tax increase.
OBAMA: My critics say everything is a tax increase. My critics say that I’m taking over every sector of the economy. You know that. Look, we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not we’re going to have an individual mandate or not, but…
STEPHANOPOULOS: But you reject that it’s a tax increase?
OBAMA:
- George Stephanopoulos
Watch the full interview HERE
Agree. The Government cannot manage /run healthcare of any size.
Assuming Gruber was paid to write and hide what he knew/understood were taxes to appear as anything else shows fraud in my opinion. Gruber is upset that he was caught red handed bragging to his fellow liberal elite professors how he fooled and defrauded the stupid public and republicans for their own good. The entire leadership of the Dem party plus Obama was in on this. Put them all in prison.
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