Robin SmithJonathan Gruber, architect of the Affordable Care Act, was recently featured in several videos offering remarks about an important aspect of passing Barack Obama’s signature legislation in 2010.
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO [Congressional Budget Office] scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies,” Gruber said. “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 … 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.”
The ACA earned its moniker, Obamacare, after becoming law without a single Republican vote in the U.S. House or Senate.
What were the promises of Obamacare, in the president’s own words?
“If you like your plan/doctor, you can keep your plan/doctor.”