Loose talk – or candid views, depending on your political leaning – from an academic health economist came like manna from heaven for Republicans and other opponents of Obamacare, feeding the latest partisan attacks on the US president’s signature healthcare law.
Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was videotaped during a panel discussion last year saying President Barack Obama's 2010 legislation extending health coverage to millions of Americans passed the Congress because of a "lack of transparency" and "the stupidity of the American voter".
Gruber, frequently described as the “architect of Obamacare”, played a key role in helping design the Massachusetts state system on which Obamacare was based and later advised the Obama administration on the design of the nationwide healthcare scheme.
The recording of the discussion on October 17th, 2013, at the University of Pennsylvania was uploaded to the internet on November 7th and has been viewed more than 900,000 times. The comments have ignited a political firestorm over the most sweeping piece of social legislation passed in generations, which Republicans want repealed.
Speaking on the panel, the professor said the law was written in “a tortured way” to make sure that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) did not refer to the penalties on individuals for not buying insurance under the law, known as the individual mandate, as “taxes”.
“If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the Bill dies, so it’s written to do that,” he said.
“If you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not be passed, okay,” he continued.
“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”
Further comments by Gruber emerged in new online videos, adding fuel to the fire. In a speech at the University of Rhode Island in November 2012 he called the "Cadillac tax" on high-cost employer-provided health insurance a "very clever . . . basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter".
His remarks, dubbed "Grubergate" by Obamacare critics, suggest Democrats and the Obama White House had tinkered with the language in the Affordable Care Act to hoodwink the US public. The comments play into the hands of Republicans who maintain Obamacare is more federal government overreach and the Washington political establishment interfering in the lives of Americans.
Four days after the video was posted online, Gruber apologised, telling MSNBC in an interview that he was speaking at an academic conference, that his remarks were “off the cuff” and that he spoke “inappropriately”. “I regret having made those comments,” he said.
Obama and his administration have sought to distance themselves from the academic. On his trip to Australia last week the president dismissed Gruber as “some adviser who never worked on our staff”, adding that he completely disagreed with his comments.
Fanning flames
The White House yesterday tried to play down the controversy. “Some Republicans are fanning the flames of those old political arguments because it’s politically advantageous,” said Obama’s press secretary Josh Earnest, adding that it was easier to talk for them about old videos than how millions were now insured.
David Axelrod, a former senior aide to the president, went further. "If you looked up 'stupid' in [a] dictionary, you'd find Gruber's picture," he said in a message posted on Twitter that captured how many Democrats feel about the professor.
Despite the rejection of Gruber and his views, the US media has linked him back to Obama, noting that he visited the White House more than a dozen times and met high-level administration officials, including a meeting with the president in the Oval Office, during the debate over the law. He was paid $400,000 by the department of health and human services for his work on the law.
Democrat Nancy Pelosi, who as speaker of the House of Representatives helped guide Obamacare through Congress in 2010, said of Gruber last week: "I don't know who he is. He didn't help write our Bill." However, old C-Span press conference footage surfaced showing her citing the economist in support of the law in 2009.
Republicans opposed to a law that led them to shut down the government in October 2013 for the first time in 17 years have taken full advantage of Gruber’s remarks. They come at an opportune time for the party that will assume control of Congress in January following their November 4th midterm election victories in the US Senate.
The supreme court is set to debate Obamacare for a second time on whether the state exchanges set up to sell Obamacare policies are legal. (The court upheld the “individual mandate” in a ruling in 2012.) A new poll from Gallup, released on Monday, shows approval for the healthcare law at an all- time low with just 37 per cent of those surveyed saying they approved of it, as opposed to 56 per cent who disapproved of it.
Grubergate puts further pressure on one of the biggest and politically most divisive achievements of Obama’s presidency.
