Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller documents recent comments from former federal Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
In an interview in which she tried to distance herself from Jonathan Gruber’s remarks about how Obamacare was crafted, former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sounded a lot like the MIT economist.
“I think one of the things that we have learned with the passage of the law … is a lot of Americans have no idea what insurance is about,” Sebelius told USA Today.
Sebelius served as Health and Human Services secretary from the beginning of President Obama’s first term through this June. She came under heavy fire for the federal health law’s rocky roll-out.
Consumers “have no idea, even if they have coverage, what it means, what a deductible is, what a co-pay is, how to choose a network,” Sebelius said, adding that those were “complicated terms.”
“I think the financial literacy of a lot of people — particularly people who did not have insurance coverage or whose employers choose their coverage and kind of present it to them — is very low,” said Sebelius. “And that has be a sort of stunning revelation, and it’s not because anybody hid it from folks, it’s that this is a complicated product.”
In citing the public’s low financial literacy, Sebelius sounded a lot like Gruber who, at a speech at the University of Rhode Island in 2012, said that the passage of one portion of Obamacare — the so-called Cadillac tax — involved “a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.”
