WASHINGTON — A top architect of ObamaCare is under heavy fire after saying the “stupidity” of the American public was critical to the law’s passage — along with deliberate subterfuges.
“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” the adviser, MIT health economist Jonathan Gruber, declared in newly unearthed video from an academic conference at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013.
“And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass,” he added.
“Look, I wish . . . that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”
Gruber also pointed to deliberate efforts by the administration and congressional backers to include mandates and subsidies for insurance rather than levying what might be called a “tax.”
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the [health-care] mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. OK, so it’s written to do that,” he explained.
“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.”
“To me his comments are very offensive,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told The Post. “He is one of the very high-paid consultants intended to deliberately deceive the American people.”
As a consultant, Gruber banked nearly $400,000 from the Department of Health and Human Services.
Gruber expressed regret for his comments in an appearance on MSNBC Tuesday. “I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately, and I regret having made those comments,” he said.
Before he was a key Obama health adviser, Gruber helped craft RomneyCare in Massachusetts.
In another tape aired on Fox News, Gruber referred to a tax on high-end “Cadillac” health plans that was supposedly going to be paid by insurance companies, but was actually passed on to consumers.
“They proposed it and that passed, because the American people are too stupid to understand the difference,” Gruber said at a 2013 forum at Washington University in St. Louis.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) also blasted Gruber’s comments, and told The Washington Post: “We may want to have hearings on this. We shouldn’t be surprised they were misleading us.”