Obamacare architect apologizes for saying American voters stupid

Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist and key architect of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), is now apologizing for saying  “the stupidity of the American voters” helped Obamacare pass. Grbuer’s remarks were captured in several videos which have now gone viral across the Internet.

In the new clip, Gruber claims the health care law’s authors took advantage of the “stupid” American public. The tape, played on Fox News’ “The Kelley File,” showed Gruber speaking at an October 2013 event at Washington University in St. Louis.

This was in regards to the “Cadillac tax” on high-end health plans: “They proposed it and that passed, because the American people are too stupid to understand the difference.”

“I basically spoke inappropriately,” he told Ronan Farrow, “and I regret having made those comments.”

Sadly, this wasn’t the only time Gruber has expressed his disdain for the voting public. During a speech at the University of Rhode Island in November 2012:

“It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter,” Gruber said and then praised former Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who Gruber called a “hero,” for successfully pushing through a 40 percent excise tax on insurance companies for plans that cost more than $10,200 for individuals and $27,000 for families.

This was an alternative to putting a cap on tax breaks employers provide employees for health insurance plans, which, according to Gruber, the public mistook for a tax increase rather than the removal of a tax break, notes Hot Air.

“You just can’t get through, it’s just politically impossible,” Gruber said during his talk.

Here’s more from Gruber via Mediaite:

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If [Congressional Budget Office] 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 that 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. And it’s the second-best argument. Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.

and

I think what’s important to remember politically about this, is 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. I hope that’s a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these Exchanges, and that they’ll do it. But you know, once again, the politics can get ugly around this.