Um.... What does it say when they have no concerns about publicly calling us stupid and bragging about how they complicated a law to such an extent that we couldnt understand it and/or object to the truth behind the law... because they wanted the law. Does this not make you uncomfortable in the least? Jonathan Gruber, the MIT health economist who helped craft parts of the Affordable Care Act, got fairly candid about the tactics used to get the Affordable Care Act passed during a panel at the Annual Health Economists’ Conference last year. “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes,” Gruber said in one 52-second clip. “If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. OK, 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 healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.” “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber said. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass.” Better for the American people to be saddled with a law they don’t understand, Gruber claimed, than for them to understand the law and rally against it. “Look, I wish … we could make it all transparent,” Gruber said, “but I’d rather have this law than not.”
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 17:29:40 +0000
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