Health care

A recently released video of Jonathan Gruber, a MIT professor, considered one of the architects of Obamacare, has casts some unflattering light on the whole process. Here is a quote from his speech given at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and it just surfaced this week. This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. OK? So it's written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said healthy people are going to pay in — you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money — it would not have passed. OK? 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 the thing to pass. Look, I wish ... we could make it all transparent, but I'd rather have this law than not. Recall that this bill was written in secrecy by the Senate and passed both houses with no Republican votes. This was when the Democrats had a super majority in the senate and majority in the house so the Republicans could not stop the bill. The last two Senators to come on board were Landry from Louisiana and she later bragged that she got 300 million for her state for her vote. The other hold out was Senator Ben Nelson from Nebraska whose state received 100 million. It was later admitted that these elected officials did not read the bill and recall Nancy Pelosi’s now rather innocuous statement that we should pass it then read it. I tend to agree with the statement about the stupidity of the voters because The President said right from the outset that the plan would insure 31 million new people at no additional cost. This was one of those half-truths that government is famous for as the cost in dollars would not increase but deductibles would and along with rationing the cost savings would be achieved.