Blog - Why Don't Democrats Trust Americans?

Statement

It's hard to convey how differently Washington insiders see things from the way most of us in Wisconsin do. But the videorecorded honesty of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber is helping make it clear.

Gruber was a health care economist famous for his ability to forecast costs. That's why the Obama administration paid him about $400,000 to consult in the design of the "Affordable Care Act," the 2,700-page bill with the Orwellian name that set off the chaos in health care we have all been suffering. Then Gruber started explaining to insider conferences just how harsh the law's trade-offs are. These are the talks that are now being discovered. They're devastating to the supporters of Obamacare, and a committee in the House is going to ask Gruber for explanations today.

So Politico, a newspaper and website written for and about Washington insiders, wrote a long article on Monday asking how Gruber could have been so devastatingly careless. "He's a smart guy, everyone says, and he has been a hugely successful economist," Politico writes. "So they're all coming back to the same question: Why the hell would he say that?" The article's conclusion is that Gruber is just too intelligent to be untruthful.

This is a problem for Democrats because Obamacare is again before the Supreme Court. A case called King vs. Burwell will examine whether Congress really meant it when the Affordable Care Act says that taxpayer subsidies for health insurance can only go to people who buy policies on state-run "exchanges," the artificial marketplaces in Obamacare. If the law is read as written, it could ruin the administration's system of making some people subsidize others.

So Democrats say that the law's plain language is wrong. The Obama administration claims the subsidies really can also go to about 5 million recipients in the 36 states without their own exchanges -- one of them Wisconsin.

Gruber has said otherwise. A video that came to widespread attention last week shows Gruber telling an audience in 2012:

"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.'"

This is on top other videos on which Gruber tells insider audiences that Obamacare was sold deceptively, with the cost hidden from taxpayers via a pitch that relied on "the stupidity of the American voter," and that Americans couldn't be told the truth that in Obamacare, young healthy people would pay too much to subsidize health care for others. Over and over, he told insiders that Obamacare was sold by deception to get Americans to accept something they were too dumb to like.

This was all while Gruber was, as Politico puts it, "Obamacare's "explainer-in-chief.'"

Politico says that Democrats are "furious" at Gruber. Of course they are. He let the cat out of the bag. But Politico's article tries to figure out why Gruber would have been so impolitically honest -- as if his honesty was the problem.

It isn't. If Jonathan Gruber had not honestly expressed the cynical truth of how Obamacare works and was passed, we would only suspect the contempt with which the administration and Democrats view the Americans who must pay for this mess. Instead, Gruber made it clear for us. His honesty was helpful.

The question Politico, the insider newspaper, never tries answering is why Democrats would design a health care "reform" so terrible that it required lies to pass. Why invent a system that needed deception and trickery and the "stupidity" of voters to work? How must Washington insiders see ordinary Americans, and how must their insider media see them, to think that an honest bill explained plainly could never work?

Why don't Democrats trust Americans?

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