If we told the truth, a consultant to President Obama says in so many words, we could never have passed Obamacare.
A tape of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of economics Jonathan Gruber, speaking about a year ago at a University of Pennsylvania event, surfaced recently on YouTube and revealed what people in the administration were told about the mammoth health care overhaul.
"This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO (the Congressional Budget Office) did not score the mandate as taxes," Gruber said. "If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, 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."
In other words, we had to make the language in the 20,000-page bill so complex and filled with legalese that the CBO did not call it a tax. If they called it a tax, our president and U.S. Senate and House members could never sell it to the American people.
Then Gruber refers to the plan's revenue scheme of having healthy, young people with few claims pay into the plan so there would be money to pay for the many claims of the sicker, older people. That scheme, however, was something the administration repeatedly declared was not true.
The man referred to as one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, who once told The New York Times he knew "more about this law than any other economist," later utters the cynical words about telling the truth.
"Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage," he says. "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 [another speaker at the event] was right that we could make it all transparent, but I'd rather have this law than not."
So, frankly, he was saying, the American voters are so stupid that if we confuse them with a lot of jargon, they'll accept whatever we tell them.
The University of Pennsylvania appearance wasn't the first time Gruber admitted plainly that information the Obama administration told the American people was contrary to what it knew to be true.
In 2012, he said the public-option portion of the Affordable Care Act was a way to move the country toward a single-payer, government-only plan, something Obama and his spinners again had vehemently denied.
And now, the United States Supreme Court has taken into consideration a specific part of the Affordable Care Act, which states that eligibility for the "affordability tax credit," or subsidy, requires enrollment "through an Exchange established by the State." Because all the states did not create state exchanges as the plan intended, though, the Internal Revenue Service read into the law the fact that such tax credits also might be given through federal and other exchanges. Four states, in turn, challenged the ruling.
Gruber, in the meantime, went on the offensive, saying that interpreting the law as it was written was "screwy," "nutty," "stupid" and "desperate" -- that it always intended federal subsidies also might be given. He even filed an amicus brief, arguing that nobody possibly could have understood the law to mean what it says.
And now two videos have surfaced with the economist spelling out that the law did, in fact, mean exactly what it said.
"What's important to remember politically," Gruber says in one of the videos, "is that if you're a state and you don't set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credit."
"[P]eople will understand that, gee, if your governor doesn't set up an exchange," he said in the second video, "you're losing hundreds of millions of dollars of tax credits to be delivered to your citizens."
Confronted with the first video, Gruber said "the statement was just a speak-o -- you know, like a typo." Not surprisingly, he's been out of public view since the release of the second tape and the most recent one in which he talked about the "stupidity of the American voter."
Today, as middle America sees its health insurance premiums increase and its coverage decrease, we can only wonder how much worse it can get before the people and their representatives in Congress demand that reforms be enacted.