Jonathan Gruber’s ObfuscatedCare

“They proposed it and that passed, because the American people are too stupid to understand the difference."--Jonathan Gruber, Obamacare architect, “Cost of Health Care” event, Washington University in St. Louis, October 2013  (see here: https://wc.wustl.edu/events/JonathanGruber--10-04-2013 / Video http://stream.nts.wustl.edu/R131004001/]

"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…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 to get the thing to pass.”–Gruber at health care conference, Penn State, October 17, 2013  (http://ldi.upenn.edu/ahec2013/agenda).

“It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.”--Gruber, University of Rhode Island, November 2012. Gruber was discussing Obamacare’s new 40% Cadillac tax on insurance plans costing $10,200 for individuals, $27,000 for families (see here: http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/12/in-third-video-obamacare-architect-talks-about-basic-exploitation-of-american-voters-video/).

“The‘Cadillac' tax isn't a tax -- it's a plan to finance real health reform.” The Cadillac tax is an “assessment on high-cost insurance plans..(the tax) bends the cost curve. It would also be progressive, in that it would take from those with the most generous insurance to finance the expansion of coverage to those without insurance.”—Gruber opinion piece in Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/27/AR2009122701714.html)

Health reform legislation “really doesn’t bend the cost curve.”—Gruber 2009

In light of the habitual, intentional deception deployed by the “White House’s favorite economist,” as Politico called Gruber, ask yourself this.

What new tax hikes in Obamacare did the White House and Gruber think Americans were too stupid to know about before the law was enacted?

New regulations?

Creating an even more intrusive IRS to probe not just individual income, but every person’s income in a household to police the law’s subsidies?

A trillion-dollar legislation spanning 2,000 pages of legislation, creating hacked health exchanges, lost jobs, higher taxes, regulation and insurance costs, was a law built on deception. It’s a law that former Dem House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this about: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.

But Rep. Pelosi now says: “I don't know who he (Gruber) is. He didn't help us write the bill, let's put him aside.”

Even though Rep. Pelosi’s Congressional website still has a piece citing “noted MIT health care economist Jonathan Gruber” on it (see here: https://web.archive.org/web/20100707104150/http:/www.speaker.gov/newsroom/factcheck?id=0142).

In fact, the MIT professor of economics was the chief go-to guy on Obamacare, rapidly delivering his cost estimates for the legislation based on his gigantic computer model, which relied on moving levers of spit-balled tax hikes and new regulation. Gruber met with the President and dozens of health advisors in the Administration on numerous occasions, plus the Administration paid him more than $392,000 in taxpayer dollars to whip fast balls by the American people. He’s another unelected, unaccountable official -- one of many -- who manipulate legislation that slam middle class families.

Gruber was part of a bigger, intentional push to deceive voters and other members of Congress to pass a law that changed one-sixth of the U.S. economy. The elitist liberal way, that they know better and everyone else is “stupid”—including Democrats who voted for them. Officials who think of themselves as far greater men than the public realizes, “self-made men who worship their own creator,” as Henry Clapp, former editor of the Saturday Press, once quipped long ago.

The “most transparent Administration”, as it likes to call itself, has consistently used false theories to sell its signature piece of legislation, which, after the briefest of time passing has already invalidated those theories.

They include statements from the President such as: Obamacare “will cut the cost of your health insurance by $2,500 per family per year” when the opposite has happened; it “will not increase the deficit” when the opposite has occurred; “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period,” as thousands lose their physicians; “Obamacare will create jobs.” Part time jobs, that is.

Nearly seven million Americans are stuck in part-time jobs they don’t want, the Wall Street Journal reports. The unemployment rate has fallen below 6% over the past year, but that is due to labor force dropouts. Millions of workers say they can’t find full-time jobs. Even though 3.3 million people found full-time jobs over the past year, it is estimated that the number of full-time workers in the U.S. is still around two million below the level of full-time employment before the recession hit in 2007. http://online.wsj.com/articles/post-recession-legacy-elevated-level-of-part-time-employment-1415808672?mod=trending_now_1 As the Democrats favorable rating plunges to a record low 36%, the Dems are now looking to put Senator Elizabeth Warren in a leadership position, ensuring ritual victimhood will get busy again, ensuring more misleading "tax the rich," "spread the wealth," and "you didn't build that" pot shots at people who did in fact build their own businesses due to their own sweat and hard work. And paid high progressive tax rates in the process, as well as created jobs.

Remember the deceptions. In order to get reluctant Congressmen and a skeptical populace on board, the Obamacare flim flam was this: Hide the true costs to dupe the CBO into thinking they were lower; disguise new middle class taxes as “mandates” or “assessments.” Also, bury the fact that the health reform law would take money from taxpayers, including the middle class, and redistribute it to others.

In September 2009, even ABC’s George Stephanopoulos pointedly asked the President about whether the individual mandate was “a tax increase.” The president dismissed it: “No, no. That’s not true, George. The — for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase.”

And remember Gruber’s breathtakingly absurd snake oil on the Cadillac tax. His argument: health benefits are not taxed as wages, so let’s slam that subsidy with a new Cadillac tax on insurers, who will pass it along to workers anyway. To justify his theory, he argued employers will pass along the difference to workers with increased pay:

“..Most companies would not end up paying this tax but would instead reduce their insurance spending to below the threshold for the tax. And when firms reduce their insurance generosity, they make it up in higher pay for their workers. By my calculations the excise tax in the Senate legislation will raise U.S. worker wages by a total of $223 billion over the next decade, which would mean about $660 in extra annual earnings per employer-insured household by 2019.”

Meanwhile, wage growth continues to flatline under the Obama Administration.

As even Howard Dean, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “The problem is not that he (Gruber) said it. The problem is that he thinks it. The core problem under the damn law is it was put together by a bunch of elitists who don’t fundamentally understand the American people.”

As the deceptions continue to roll out, the U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to hear an important, closely-watched case, King v. Burwell. This case is about whether the federal government can give federal tax credits to people enrolled in federal exchanges to buy insurance. The tax credits were enacted to incentivize the states to build exchanges on their own. Without the credits, Obamacare unravels.

There’s even more deception here too. Health reform backers now argue, in a neat bit of after-the-fact rationalization, that they never meant for the Obamacare law to not deliver tax credits on the federal exchanges.

Still think the government can do single payer?