Gruber: “Politically, you just literally cannot do … transparent financing, transparent spending. I mean, this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If the CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. So it was written to do that.”
Obama: (11/16/14) “And I think it’s fair to say there was not a provision in the healthcare law that was not extensively debated and was fully transparent.”