Obamacare Architect: ‘Lack of Transparency’ Helped Us Pass the Law [View all]

[alp227]

H/T Mediaite, basically the newest viral right wing outrage of the day. The author transcribed the video that's a 53-second clip of a longer video of MIT Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaking the 2013 UPenn Health Economists' Conference:

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If (Congressional Budget Office) 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 that 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. And it’s the second-best argument. Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.

More info about Gruber's Obamacare & Romneycare work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gruber_%28economist%29#Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act

Searching for Gruber's name in DU, I found plenty of big threads about him. Do you consider these statements problematic? (Edit) Found full video of the 2013 seminar...Go to 20:00 mark for the remarks quoted above