In a twist on John Kerry, this guy was against them before he was for them.
As the Competitive Enterprise Institute points out, Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber — “an MIT economics professor whom the The New York Times has called ‘Mr. Mandate‘ ” — said in 2012 that Obamacare consumers in states without their own healthcare exchanges aren’t eligible for the law’s subsidies.
Via a video from Jan. 2012:
What’s important to remember politically about this is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits—but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying [to] your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that that’s a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges, and that they’ll do it. But, you know, once again the politics can get ugly around this.
In other words, because the law was written so that states failing to set up their own exchanges would be shafting their citizens on receiving Obamacare subsidies, states should feel pressured to set up their own exchanges.
Why is this relevant? There’s an ongoing debate in the court system right now over whether or not citizens in states lacking state-run exchanges should be eligible for Obamacare subsidies. One federal appeals court ruled in Halbig v. Burwell that they shouldn’t be; another ruled (ed: in effect) that they should. The first court read the letter of the law as-is; the latter said that the law was ambiguous and the decision should up to the IRS.
If the Halbig decision were to stand, consumers in states without their own exchanges would have to pay substantially more on their premiums (the overall premiums wouldn’t go up — but the cost to individuals would, since the premiums wouldn’t be subsidized with the Obamacare credit):
Whoa RT @DDiamond Via @CPearsonAvalere, a state-by-state look at how much premiums would shoot up if Halbig stands: pic.twitter.com/epL2pw3lZs
— JustinGreen∞ (@JGreenDC) July 22, 2014
Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey gives a fair rundown of what all this means:
So is this a smoking gun in the Halbig case? Politically — yes. Legally? It certainly undermines one argument used by the administration to defend payment of subsidies through the federal exchanges, but it may not be entirely dispositive. What matters here is Congressional intent, not Gruber’s, to the extent that the statute itself appears ambiguous.
What’s humorous (and somewhat typical) about all this is that Gruber himself appeared on the tee-vee this week to … completely argue against his own position of two and a half years ago.
“Literally every single person involved in the crafting of this law has said that it’s a typo, that they had no intention of excluding the federal states.”
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Update: Gruber tries to clear the air to The New Republic.
I honestly don’t remember why I said that. I was speaking off-the-cuff. It was just a mistake. People make mistakes. Congress made a mistake drafting the law and I made a mistake talking about it.
Gruber also called his statement a “speak-o,” like a typo.
Jonathan Cohn, TNR’s author on this one, makes a fair point: “I obviously can’t speak to what Gruber was thinking at the time.” Indeed — all we have is what Gruber was saying at the time.
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Update: But wait, there’s more. Via Breitbart:
“[I]t turns out it was not the only time [Gruber] made such a statement. An audio clip from a public appearance Gruber made at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on January 10, 2012 reveals he made the same connection between subsidies and state-based exchanges on at least one other occasion …”
