President Obama’s national health care law was passed more than four years ago, but Americans have learned quite a bit about it in recent days. Its chief architect, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, helpfully outlined on video some of the important budgetary and rhetorical deceptions that were necessary to pass the law, noting that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” and that he and his fellow drafters relied in large part on “the stupidity of the American voter.”

His comments, made over the past three years but discovered online only now, vindicate much of the conservative criticism that was leveled at the Obamacare bill when Congress considered it and the process by which it passed.