Obamacare's Orwellian Godfather

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“‘He who controls the past controls the future,’ observed George Orwell. ‘He who controls the present controls the past.’ This, in one pithy, symmetrical little maxim, has been the story of Obamacare from its conception to the present day,” Charles C.W. Cooke writes at NRO:

Today, we are witnessing the fall from grace of the progressive health-care wonk, Jonathan Gruber, a primary architect of Obamacare who is renouncing his previous testimony with all the giddy enthusiasm of a veteran clerk in the Kruschev administration. Once upon a time, Gruber was admirably honest on the subject of how his creation worked, and what it did and did not permit the federal government to achieve. On a tour of the country in 2012, Gruber urged recalcitrant states to set up their own health insurance exchanges, explaining in no uncertain terms the consequences of their declining to do so. A video unearthed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute shows Gruber not merely laying out how the law works, but why it works as it does. “What’s important to remember politically about” Obamacare, Gruber explains, in what he happily refers to as a “verifiable, objective” presentation, “is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.” Why not? Because, while the federal government is permitted to establish an exchange per se, it is not permitted to offer any tax subsidies through it. “The law,” Gruber records flatly, “says if the states don’t provide [the exchanges], the federal backstop will. The federal government has been sort of slow in putting out its backstop, I think partly because they want to sort of squeeze the states to do it.” This, Gruber contended, was a “blatant enough political reality,” and one that he hoped would be enough for states to “get their act together and recognize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges” — billions of dollars, he went to great lengths to clarify, that would not be available through a federal exchange. No state exchange, he explained, no money.

“Fast forward a year or so, though, and you will see Gruber radically change his tune,” Cooke writes, adding, “We have always been at war with Eastasia.” Read the whole thing.

But then, we have always been at war with Eastasia:

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