Jonathan Gruber is still Republicans’ favorite Obamacare punching bag — and he knows it.
“I’m too easy to vilify,” Gruber told the Washington Examiner, when asked whether he would consider working for a Hillary Clinton White House. “They wouldn’t touch me with a 10-foot pole.”
Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who advised the White House on the healthcare law, was thrust into the political spotlight in 2014, when his past statements that Obamacare wouldn’t have passed but for the “stupidity” of voters were made public and became known as “Grubergate.”
Gruber was previously mentioned frequently in the media but has kept a low profile the last few years. But when he defended the healthcare law’s rate hikes in a CNN interview on Wednesday, Republicans quickly pounced.
“Today’s statement by Jonathan Gruber that the Obamacare rate hikes show the law is ‘working as designed’ shows that even the law’s biggest backers know it is an unmitigated disaster,” said Jason Miller, spokesman for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
The Republican National Committee also circulated Gruber’s interview, with spokesman Michael Short calling his comments “amazing” and blasting Gruber for suggesting the marketplaces could be improved if people face bigger fines for remaining uninsured.
In the CNN interview Wednesday morning, Gruber defended the Affordable Care Act with many of the same arguments the White House has been using — that most of the marketplace enrollees can receive subsidies to help pay for their plans, and millions of formerly uninsured Americans now have coverage.
And while Gruber disagreed with host Carol Costello that the law needs to be “fixed,” he suggested it could be made better, partly through a bigger penalty to push more people toward buying coverage.
“There’s no sense in which this has to be fixed, the law is working as designed,” Gruber said. “But it could work better.”
Gruber’s comments were in line with what other Democrats have said about the healthcare law: that its basic provisions are working as intended, even if some solutions are needed for prices and competition in the exchanges. Yet the mere fact that the comments were made by Gruber, the man Republicans see as a major force behind a healthcare law they hate, attracted more GOP attention than usual.
Trump has even mentioned Gruber in debates, misrepresenting the comments he had made about the law. “Jonathan Gruber, the architect of Obamacare, said it was a great lie,” Trump said during the second presidential debate on Oct. 9.
Gruber says he’s well aware that he has become a major enemy of Republicans for his role in crafting President Obama’s healthcare law and his subsequent comments about it. He told the Examiner he still gets death threats and nasty emails.
Asked whether he would consider working for a Clinton White House, Gruber said any position he would want would be one the Senate must confirm. And he doesn’t believe there’s any way that would happen, given his history.
“Any position I would want in a Clinton White House would have to be a position that would be confirmable, and there’s no way I would be confirmed,” Gruber said.
