Snopes claimed earlier this week that it was neither true nor false that Jonathan Gruber, one of the chief architects of the Affordable Care Act, said in a recently unearthed video that Obamacare was able to become law thanks to the “stupidity of the American voter.”
Rather, the popular fact-checking site gave the “stupidity of voters” claim a “mixture” rating.
Snopes has since tweaked its initial report to add more details and context, rating the story now as both “true” and “undetermined.”
“TRUE: Jonathan Gruber said Obamacare only passed due to the ‘stupidity’ of the American voter and a lack of ‘transparency,’” the updated report reads.
“UNDETERMINED: Video footage of his remarks was deleted from the Internet in an attempt to hide it,” the report adds.
American Commitment, a conservative activist group that Snopes still incorrectly identifies as a PAC, was the first to publicize Gruber’s comments, which were made in 2013 at the 24th Annual Health Economics Conference hosted by the University of Pennsylvania. The conservative group then posted an very short clip from the 51-minute panel discussion to its YouTube page last week, along with a link to the original.
“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber said. “Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever. But basically, that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”
Not long after the newly surfaced video gained national attention, the full version of the conference video disappeared from the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics YouTube account, leading to questions about whether the school tried to scrub the footage.
Confusion over whether UPenn deliberately tried to pull the video apparently threw Snopes for a spin, prompting the fact-checking site to question everything about the story.
“While the newly-circulated video of Gruber’s remarks is unedited, the comments are neither recent nor complete, and whether the originating source attempted to pull them from the Internet at one point remains unclear,” the initial report stated.
But this is what the Snopes article says now:
The Snopes article has also been updated to remove the site’s original suggestion that American Commitment’s Phil Kerpen was “responsible” for claims that the full-length YouTube video was pulled offline. In fact, the video definitely did go offline for a period of time.
The amended Snopes report also references Gruber’s attempts on Tuesday to apologize for his comments when he appeared for an interview on MSNBC.
