Jonathan Gruber, the MIT professor who was a key architect of Obamacare, may also be a central figure in the court battle over whether Obamacare subsidies are allowed for participants in the federal health insurance exchange. That’s because, as noted here, Gruber has provided the rationale for the statutory language that bars such subsidies. He thus undermines Team Obama’s argument that the statutory language can’t possibly mean what it says.
Now, we learn that Gruber, whose mouth apparently is as big as all outdoors, also served up words that pertain to the merits of the big 2012 Supreme Court decision upholding the individual mandate as a “tax.” During a panel discussion captured on video, Gruber explained that the individual mandate is not a tax, and was presented as one in order “to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes.” Team Obama deemed the deception critical because “if CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.”
Gruber expanded on the theme of deception:
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.Actually, the American voter wasn’t stupid about Obamacare. They never supported it, as public opinion polls showed. And twice, they put a licking on Democrats who voted Obamacare into law.
It's amazing how clever these progressives think they are.
