Infamous MIT professor Jonathan Gruber is again counting on “the stupidity of the American voter” to keep ObamaCare alive. The disgraced architect of the Affordable Care Act told a Boston business journal that Clinton has “a strong and coherent health care agenda” as opposed to Trump’s “garbage salad of right-wing talking points.”
Gruber made the comments after being dragged back into the public spotlight by Donald Trump in the debate Sunday night.
“You know that — because Jonathan Gruber, the architect of Obamacare — he said it was a great lie, it was a big lie,” Trump said. “President Obama said you keep your doctor, you keep your plan. The whole thing was a fraud, and it doesn’t work.”
Trump was referring to recorded comments Gruber made at various panels and speaking engagements from 2011-2014 after ObamaCare’s passage. While sitting on a healthcare panel at the University of Pennsylvania in October of 2013, for instance, Gruber said, “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.” In another recording, Gruber is heard saying, “American voters are too stupid to understand the difference” in the language of the Affordable Care Act.
While discussing what is known as the Cadillac tax and how it came into being, Gruber bragged about exploiting the ignorance of the American voter. “It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter,” he said during his speech at the University of Rhode Island in November 2012.
During an appearance before a Vermont legislative panel in February of 2011, the ObamaCare architect dismissed a constituent’s written warning that the massive, top-down government health insurance program would not work. After listening to a list of predicted negative consequences, Gruber scoffed that it sounded like something that might have been “written by my adolescent children.”
All fourteen of the Gruber tapes can be viewed here.
Thanks to the professor, a new word has entered American lexicon:
When someone lies to you and gets away with it, especially if they brag about it to someone after. The act of being grubered is grubering when someone is in the act of trying to pull one over on you.
To mislead the public into believing lies to pass personal ideological laws.
The President really grubered us on that healthcare bill.
Via the Boston Business Journal:
Gruber, who served as a board member of the state’s online health marketplace until last year, has since apologized for the comments and testified about them in front of members of the United States Congress. When asked to respond on Trump’s comments, Gruber said the debate showed who really has a grasp of health care reform.
“My only comment is that last night showed the difference between a candidate with a strong and coherent health care agenda (Clinton) and one with a garbage salad of right wing talking points (Trump),” Gruber wrote in an email.
Call it “the stupidity of the American voter or whatever,” but with less than a month to go before election day, Clinton is leading in the polls. And that means the left’s dream of a single-payer healthcare system is that much closer to being realized.
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