Obamacare architect knew U.S. workers would lose job-based insurance
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| Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber |
Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber – who has been making headlines
this week after a video surfaced of him admitting the law was meant to
take advantage of the “stupidity of the American voter”
– acknowledged that the administration knew U.S. workers would lose
their job-based health insurance when President Obama’s signature
legislation took effect.
“If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it,” Obama said numerous times when pitching the new law.
But by fall 2013, more than 4 million Americans were getting cancellation letters in their mailboxes.
As it turns out, Gruber, also an MIT economics professor, apparently
knew it would happen – reportedly comparing U.S. workers losing their
insurance to people “falling off a building.”
In a Nov. 13 piece for Time magazine,
reporter Kate Pickert wrote, “I’ve talked to Gruber many times over the
past six years. He’s a good source because he’s smart, candid and was
privy to the Democratic behind-the-scenes thinking and maneuvering that
preceded passage of the Affordable Care Act.”
Pickert recalled a particular conversation she had with Gruber: “In
2013, for instance, I asked Gruber if Democrats understood that the ACA
would slowly and methodically erode the system under which millions of
Americans get health insurance through their jobs. In pitching the ACA,
Democrats had been adamant that the law would support and sustain the
employer-based system, not erode it. But Gruber knew better and he
told me so, likening workers being kicked off job-based health plans to
people ‘falling off a building,’ an outcome that architects of the ACA
knew was likely and had planned for“ (italics added).
In February this year, the Congressional Budget Office released its annual Budget and Economic Outlook, projecting, as
a result of Obamacare,”between 6 million and 7 million fewer people
will have employment-based insurance coverage each year from 2016
through 2024 than would be the case in the absence of the ACA.”
The Washington Times reported taxpayers paid Gruber millions for his
work on Obamacare. Not only did he receive hundreds of thousands from
the White House, but many states paid him as much as $400,000 each to
produce reports praising the health-care law.
‘Stupidity of the American voter’
As WND reported earlier this week,
the conservative group American Commitment discovered Gruber’s
“stupidity of the American voter” comments in a YouTube video filmed at
an event in October 2013. The comments came less than three weeks into
the chaotic open enrollment of the federal health-care exchange. Gruber
offered an unguarded view of the White House approach to the health-care
debate in 2009-2010.
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure that CBO (the
Congressional Budget Office) did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO
scores the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. OK. So it’s written to do
that,” Gruber said. “In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law
that made it explicit that the healthy people pay in and sick people get
money, it would not have passed.”
Gruber’s attitude toward winning over enough of the public to get the law approved was even more blunt.
“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. Call it the
stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was
really, really critical to getting the thing to pass,” he said.
In yet another video released Thursday,
Gruber told college students at the College of the Holy Cross on March
11, 2010, that Democrats deceptively pushed Obamacare as a bill that
would control soaring health costs, but there was never any guarantee
Obamacare could actually do that.
“Barack Obama’s not a stupid man, OK?” Gruber said. “He knew when he
was running for president that, quite frankly, the American public
doesn’t actually care that much about the uninsured. … What the American
public cares about is costs.”
He added, “And that’s why even though the bill that they made is 90
percent health insurance coverage and 10 percent about cost control, all
you ever hear people talk about is cost control. How it’s going to
lower the cost of health care, that’s all they talk about. Why? Because
that’s what people want to hear about because a majority of American
care about health care costs.”
Gruber said the Obama administration took the “spaghetti approach,” throwing a bunch of stuff to the wall to see what sticks.
“The only way we’re going
to stop our country from being a latter day Roman Empire and falling
under its own weight is getting control of the growth rate of
health-care costs. The problem is, we don’t know how. [Experts] know
what the problem is,” he said. “Our providers are paid enormously high.
In the 1950s, surgeons are middle-class guys like professors. … Now they
live on the Hamptons, the Cape; they’re like investment bankers.”
Gruber said real efforts to cut costs were not politically beneficial.
“The problem is if we
just say, ‘Look, let’s just cut our spending,’ well, the problem is
you’re going to then eat into what the rich guys are getting that
they’re liking. And that doesn’t go so well. That’s going to be pretty
hard politically. That’s why no one has a politically feasible way right
now to bend the cost curve, it just doesn’t exist.”
Gruber added that if lawmakers suggested slashing costs, they “wouldn’t win many elections.”
Also on Thursday, Gateway
Pundit published a 2012 “Frontline” interview in which Gruber reveals
that he personally worked with Obama on another Obamacare deception – this time concerning the so-called “Cadillac tax” – in a 2009 White House meeting.
Gateway Pundit confirmed
Gruber did, in fact, meet with the president in the Oval Office for
almost four hours on July 20,2009, “to find ways to game the CBO numbers
so that the bill would pass.”
Gruber’s abortion boast
WND reported Friday
that Gruber published a paper during the Clinton administration
observing that legalizing abortion saved the government $14 billion in
assistance to economically disadvantaged mothers, including
African-Americans, and lowered crime.
Gruber argued in his paper
that without the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, “marginal children” would
have been born to many poor mothers. He said statistics show these
children would have been 70 percent more likely to live in a
single-parent family, 40 percent more likely to live in poverty, 50
percent more likely to receive welfare and 35 percent more likely to die
as an infant.
Economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner in their bestselling 2005 book “Freakonomics,”
relied on Gruber’s work to argue that legalizing abortion was
responsible for an approximately 50 percent reduction of crime in major
urban centers in the early 1990s.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/11/gruber-knew-americans-would-lose-job-based-insurance/#FwXOlZgbwyVSMeLg.99
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