The Affordable Care Act was able to make its way through Congress and to the desk of President Obama thanks in part to a “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter,” or so says Jonathan Gruber, one of the law’s chief architects.
“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber said in 2013 during the Annual Health Economists’ Conference hosted by the University of Pennsylvania. “Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever. But basically, that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”
Footage of the 2013 event, although readily available previously through the YouTube channel of the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, received attention after it was circulated online last week by the conservative group American Commitment. The Institute subsequently pulled down its video of the event (of which the Washington Examiner had a copy) but then reposted it around 1:30 pm today.
Gruber, an MIT health economist, said that he would have liked for the massive healthcare law to have been passed in a more transparent manner, but he added it would have never been signed into law had American voters known more about it.
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes,” Gruber said. “If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, 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.”
He added: It’s good that the American people didn’t come together to protest the bill.
“Look, I wish … we could make it all transparent,” Gruber said, “but I’d rather have this law than not.”
