Jonathan Gruber, man of the people, explains the passage of Obamacare
The way I see it, this video of Jonathan Gruber merely exposes the so-called Obamacare architect admitting what everybody who’s been paying any real attention already knew: the intentional duplicity with which the law was passed on the part of the Democrats. The only surprise is how open Gruber is about it.
He must have thought he was among friends, and I suppose he probably was. Or maybe he just thought everybody already knew what he was saying, anyway. And if they didn’t, they should have:
Here’s the text of what he said:
This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. 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”¦ 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….Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.
Gruber had been painted by the MSM as a neutral expert of some sort, but he’s always been very very partisan. Some people seem to think Gruber is describing his own strategy for framing and passing the bill, but I read it more as his description of the general Democratic strategy. What Gruber specialized in was making pseudo-scientific predictions about how wonderful Obamacare would be for people, and then having to backtrack:
Gruber has admitted that his model has a catastrophic flaw: it can’t model the impact of Obamacare’s requirement that insurers take all comers regardless of pre-existing conditions.
In the video, Gruber describes pretty accurately what liberals did and how they lied in order to make Obamacare seem much more attractive that it actually is. But he did make one glaring error.:
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
Aside from Gruber’s condescension here about those stupid proles, he’s just plain wrong about what happened. The peons are actually smarter than he thinks: they never bought that steaming pile of manure. The people have been against this from the start, and nothing has changed in that regard.
Obamacare was not passed by referendum, it was passed by House and Senate. The people tried desperately to make their wishes known, but the Democratic representatives who were in the majority at the time refused to listen. Their leadership whipped them into line, and although a few were “allowed” to vote against, Pelosi and Reid made sure it wouldn’t be enough of them to actually derail the bill. Why did they allow some to vote against Obamacare? Because they knew just how very unpopular it was, and how those who voted for it in districts where it was unpopular were very much at risk of not being returned to Congress in the next election.
And that’s exactly how it went. 2010 was a protest election that returned the House to Republican hands. What were the people protesting? Why, Obamacare.
So who’s stupid, Gruber?
Who’s stupid? The Democrats/progressives who bought it completely. The ones who believed Obama’s lies about keeping their doctor, about families saving $2500, etc.
For some reason, whenever I recall the Obamacare legislation battle, the one image that comes to mind is Pelosi (wielding that cartoonishly large gavel) and her gang defiantly marching right through the crown of Tea Party protesters. That was a show of force, not convincing the “stupid” American people that Obamacare was a good thing. They used every trick, bribed any Dem legislator on the fence, and bent whatever rules necessary to push it through.
http://tinyurl.com/mb69euu
The stupid voter moniker is not entirely unwarranted as most voters seem not to know what they want until they don’t want it. They are also not too bright as to the regnant process of passing bills into law.
“ This bill was written in a tortured way to make…
… the various oversight committees, bureaucracies, and tsardoms, the writers of the law, i.e., provide its rules, regulations, definitions, addenda, codicils, abrogations of any such, as is called for by contingencies.”
Nancy P. wasn’t lying when she said we’d have to pass it before we could know what’s in it.
Still don’t know what’s in it.
Especially since it keeps a’ changin’…
A chameleon law for a chameleon regime.
(Actually, make that a Gila monster….)
Based on the comments I have read, I suspect that there are thousands if not tens of thousands who would like to pitch this commie $***bag off the Nakatomi building.
Isn’t this the same guy who recently came up with the “speak-o” as in typo defense for another comment he made about Obamacare? Something to do with federal subsidies and state exchanges.
Who was he among, where was that speech given? Who can be depended upon to think that this is OK?
Even at this late hour, the punditry has missed the big picture.
0-care — as a huge tax — kills of the First Time Home-buyer. This impact is going to be felt right in front of the 2016 election.
The housing ladder has been a mainstay of America’s economy since 1946.
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The significance?
Most modern money starts life as a real estate loan. Such loans are the largest that most citizens ever take on, and they endure.
So a slowdown in real estate mortgage origination HAS to mean a slowdown in money growth.
It also HAS to mean a slowdown in every manner of consumer durables strongly associated with one’s first time home purchase.
White goods
Furniture
Appliances
Fire insurance
Title fees
Brokerage fees
And of course, all of the direct construction labor and materials — and the taxes and fees levied on housing developments.
[ In my burg, the fee/ tax on hooking up a 2″ (commercial) water service to the municipal utility is $75,000. !!! That one time tax disappears into the irrigation district budget. It doesn’t pay for anything other than permission.]
0-care hoovers up all of the cash flow that’s traditionally gone towards home purchases.
When I bring up this arithmetic in real estate forums — most are in total denial. Only one in five ‘gets it.’
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And in all of this hubbub … few comment on the fact that America doesn’t have enough doctor graduates — not by a long shot.
So medical fees are bound to take off: more funding — same supply.
Here is his utterly slimy apology today, made of course on MSNBC: “The comments in the video were made at an academic conference,” Gruber said. “I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately and I regret having made those comments.”
Notice everything that’s missing from that? Notice all the messages left carefully in place?
Obamacare Architect Admits Deceiving Americans to Pass Law
I am wondering who he thinks was deceived and tricked. I agree that it was not the vast majority of middle America. It seems to me that the only people who were taken in were some Dem pols and the chumps who make up the Obama coalition, and the useless media.
Furthermore, I hope a lot of people know that this legislation represents Dems spreading their legs for the insurance industry. It was a win,win for the CEOs; they got to resurrect, recycle and foist the kr@ppy restricted insurance policies, from the 90s, on the public, even after they failed in the market place.
blert,
I have contended for these last few years that o-care will be the (huge) straw that breaks the back of this struggling economy. Billions sucked up by this monstrosity with cripple every other sector of the economy.
This is a case of being honest about the need to lie and deceive the hoi poloi.
“Call it the stupidity of the American voter…” – is Gruber’s reason for the need for lack of transparency. That is, the voter is not educated or sophisticated enough to appreciate socialized medicine. So, get the thing done before it can be rejected by these dolts – and they did.
Just in time in the way of writing or speaking in a “tortured way” there is an interview with Rowan Farrow in which Rowan tells Jonathan and his viewers – all two thousand of them – that Jonathan’s comments were “nuanced” . But I don’t think Jonathan was ready to go along with that one.
Exasperated
NE’s Ben Nelson was the 60th vote. He came from the insurance industry and be returned to it.
Also check out the stock action of the health insurance companies since 2009.
You are exactly right.
I don’t think any Dem pols were taken in by the bait-and-switch routine. What Gruber et al. provided was a cover.
One of the idiots I know (NYer, artist, 65) declared to me just tonight that the current insurance debacle is CAPITALISM in action. “Welcome to America!” the fool exclaimed.
I cussed him out and told him this is socialism on steroids; he just laughed at me and told me to stay angry. I coulda kicked him where it hurts.
These people really are insane.
Faced with a government of this quality, what would the Founding Father do? What would Robert Fitzwalter do? What will we do?
* * *
“They never speak except to lie.”
I suppose some of the pols were privy to the scam.
After all, as the jobs, suitable for regular everyday people, disappear faster than they are created, they have to create fake, make work jobs, with impressive titles, even if amounts to the frivolous sifting of minutia. ACA is all about the practice of medicine by administrators and technocrats, who are once of twice removed form the efficient delivery of medical care.
You only have to look at who & how the ACA was created to deduce that the corruption and racketeering will come from the top down and the inside out.
1. Look for tens of thousands of bogus make work jobs to benefit the pols and ACORN types. Lots of non-productive, circular paper shuffling, pencil pushing employment, aka featherbedding, for the self- important and mediocre, but credentialed, children of the Clerisy.
2. Look for greater fraud: graft, kickbacks, counterfeit pacemakers etc. and payoffs by medical purveyors to get their products or services on the “preferred list”.
3. Look for special interest groups to que up for preferential treatment based on the cliched sob story.
4. Look for the healthcare industry to benefit, (as auto insurance did with compulsary insurance) even as the pols stick their hands deeper into the industry’s pockets.
5. Look for the Secular Calvinists to dictate life style because that is what really underlies preventive medicine not screening which is usually a wash in terms of cost/benefit.
6. Expect to pay more for less and anticipate medical protocols influenced by deep pockets and pressure groups(legitimate or crank). Think the anti-vaccine crowds undue influence.
In short, look for the same General Cluster that the pols created in education.
We know that lawyers were left off the hook but how about universities and research institutes that hold a lot of valuable patents for medicines, procedures, devices, technologies and chemicals?
And yes, I am from Chicago, fourth generation.
The more lawsuits there are, the more the lawyer unions profit.
Not sure why anyone is getting their knickers in a knot over Gruber’s comments.
Anyone who has spent any time around members of the credentialed progressive clerisy knows that this is how they think.
He is insulting the intelligence of those who supported Obamacare, not its opponents.
Those same low information voters stayed home in droves last week, and look what happened.