Although Obamacare architect Jonathan “serial speak-os” Gruber has found himself an unwitting YouTube star yet again for accidentally telling truths about the Affordable Care Act, he is not the only one responsible for insulting Americans’ intelligence with respect to the ACA.
If you missed it here and elsewhere, Gruber participated on a panel discussion October 17, 2013, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economic, in which 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.
Who else has been insulting American voters regarding Obamacare?
First and foremost, of course, is the president. His oft-repeated Lie of the Year (because it is still too early to declare for the decade) was a huge, smug act of disrespect to Americans over whom this act would lord over:
That means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.
But let’s not forget the administration’s volunteer messaging service in the media. Remember that the Associated Press and Politico defended him over The Lie by blaming it on you stupid people. The AP wrote:
President Barack Obama’s early efforts to boil down an intricate health care law so Americans could understand it are coming back to haunt him, leaving a trail of caveats and provisos in place of the pithy claims he once used to sell the law.
If you dummies could mentally process the caveats and provisos, the president wouldn’t need to oversimplify to the point of outright lying. He could tell the truth the smart people. Hang your heads in abject shame. (That means feel bad.)
Politico put it this way:
President Barack Obama’s soundbites are coming back to bite him.
As he attempted to sell a complex health care reform plan to skeptical voters during the 2008 campaign and his first year in office, Obama boiled down the benefits to a series of pithy promises.
It was, of course, the wildest of coincidences that independent news writers happened to use the same terms like that. (Probably you stupid people’s fault for that, too.)