…so they hid the truth on purpose.
Amy Miller
Legal Insurrection
11/10/2014
One of Obamacare’s architects was recently caught in a nasty moment of honesty that has the potential to further damage Democrats who signed on to the Affordable Care Act.
Jonathan Gruber, who served as a technical advisor to President Obama during the ACA’s planning phases, revealed during a panel discussion that Obamacare was not designed as a tax, and that the lack of transparency about the new law was the only thing that saved the controversial legislation from an untimely death in Congress.
“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.”
That’s some strategy.
Watch the video at Legal Insurrection.
Related: There’s more at The Right Scoop
Supreme Court to hear new ObamaCare challenge (video)
…At issue in this case is the legality of subsidies offered to help millions of low- and middle-income people buy health insurance. Opponents argue that most of the subsidies are illegal.
A federal appeals court upheld Internal Revenue Service regulations that allow health-insurance tax credits under the Affordable Care Act for consumers in all 50 states.
But opponents of the subsidies argued the Supreme Court should resolve the issue now because it involves billions of dollars in public money. At least four justices, needed to grant review, apparently agreed with the challengers that the issue is important enough to decide now…
Update: Statement on Supreme Court Granting Cert in King v. Burwell
Update 2: U Penn Deletes Video Of Obamacare Architect Insulting American Voters
…Shortly after people began drawing attention to the deleted video, a new video of the event was uploaded and embedded on the conference page. U Penn has still not commented publicly on why the original video was deleted.
Read the whole thing.
