ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber has admitted that the Obama administration’s lack of transparency was necessary in order to get the president’s healthcare law passed, adding that the legislation was written in an intentionally vague manner because of “the stupidity of the American voter.”
Fox News noted that Gruber is an MIT professor who played a role in the design for ObamaCare. He appeared at a panel hosted by the Penn Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics on October 17, 2013, which was captured on video but posted only recently, wherein he admitted that though the individual mandate was upheld by the Supreme Court because it was perceived as a tax, it is in fact not a tax.
Gruber explained, “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.”
Speaking as a true elitist, Gruber asserted, “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 for the thing to pass.”
Gruber outlined exactly what was needed to be done in order for the bill to pass:
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.
Gruber added that he wished the law could have been transparent, but that he’d “rather have this law than not.”
Evidently Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi felt the same way. On March 9, 2010, she spoke to the National Association of Counties about the healthcare bill that was just days away from being passed, asserting,
You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention — it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting. But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.
Ironically, in the very same year that Gruber admitted an intentional lack of transparency, Obama declared that his White House was “the most transparent administration in history.”
Of course, Gruber’s remarks should not shock most observers, as it became clear early on that the Obama administration had purposefully created a “fog” around the healthcare law and deceived the American people.
When the president was promoting ObamaCare in 2009, he made an abundance of promises that were later broken, most notably that the American people could keep their doctors. “First, no matter what’ve you’ve heard, if you like your doctor — or health care plan — you can keep it,” the president assured citizens.
Years later, however, a significant number of Americans, in fact, lost their physicians.
Time.com reported in 2013, “In order to participate in health-insurance exchanges, insurers needed to find a way to tamp down the high costs of premiums. As a result, many will narrow their networks, shrinking the range of doctors that are available to patients under their plan, experts say.”
Experts have indicated that this is a consequence that the president and those who wrote the law should have been able to foresee. “Many people are going to find out that the second part of the promise — that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor — just wasn’t true,” asserted Gail Wilensky, who directed the federal Medicare and Medicaid programs under President George H.W. Bush. “This is not magic stuff,” she noted.
Likewise, Factcheck.org labelled the president’s promise “misleading,” indicating that while the law does not specify that people would need to pick a new doctor, there is an implicit understanding that a switch may be inevitable for some. “The President simply can’t make this promise to anyone,” the site said.
The statements of ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber clearly indicate, however, that the president was being intentionally misleading — which critics of the law and of this administration knew all along.
Time.com observed that shortly after the healthcare law was passed, the Obama administration conveniently stopped promising that Americans would be able to keep their physicians. “If you are looking for, if you want coverage from your doctor, a doctor that you’ve seen in the past, and want that, you can look and see if there’s a plan which that doctor participates in,” said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. (Emphasis added.)
By this year, the president had completely reneged on his promise, admitting during an interview with WebMD that Americans “might end up having to switch doctors.” But by then, the bill was already law, and the charade was no longer necessary.
Unfortunately, Gruber’s elitist mentality that the American people are far too “stupid” to make up their own minds is not abnormal in the Obama administration. Take, for example, Cass Sunstein, Obama’s former regulatory czar and author of Nudge — Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Sunstein’s book provides a variety of behavioral psychology measures that can be taken to “nudge” Americans toward healthier lifestyles while causing them to think that in fact they are making the decisions themselves.
Sunstein has indicated that the presence of too many choices can be confusing to people. In describing the premise of his book, he virtually claimed that the American people were too ignorant and undisciplined to make proper decisions. “We think there is a little Homer Simpson in all of us,” he asserted. “Sometimes we have self-control problems, sometimes we’re impulsive. In these circumstances, both public and private institutions, without coercing, can make our lives a lot better.”
According to Sunstein, “Once we know that people are human and have some Homer Simpson in them, then there’s a lot that can be done to manipulate them.” It is that very some philosophy that was involved in the creation and selling of ObamaCare.
But despite the revelation that the architects of this law capitalized on the “stupidity of the American people,” conservative media pundit Rush Limbaugh observed, “There has never been majority support for this bill. That’s the one thing you must never lose sight of here. Don’t ever forget: They never did fool a majority of the American people.”
