Pretty simple words in the headline, quoted from several of ♡bamaCare!!!’s 2,000-plus pages — and yet Peter Suderman must explain for Jonathan Gruber why Gruber meant what he meant when he said what he said about ♡bamaCare!!! subsidies and state exchanges:
Nor does he raise the possibility that the federal government might fail to set up an exchange in the other recording. In that recorded speech, he says that “if your governor doesn’t set up an exchange, you’re losing hundreds of millions of dollars of tax credits to be delivered to your citizens.” Again, he’s not saying, “if your governor doesn’t set up the exchange and the federal government also doesn’t set up an exchange.” He’s just saying that this is the result of a state not building its own exchange.
Gruber’s suggestion that he was thinking that the federal government might fail to create an exchange is also odd given that the federal government is required by law to do so if a state does not. Asked about this requirement today by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Gruber claimed not to recall the exact details of what the law entails. That’s tough to believe given that Gruber spent years as a high-profile, well-paid consultant to states considering setting up their own exchanges. But even if he does not remember the details now, it is even harder to believe that Gruber did not know about this requirement back in 2012, when he was in the midst of exchange-relaed consulting work for multiple states.
Finally, Gruber admitted that he has come up with this explanation for what he must have been trying to say entirely after the fact. While “thinking about how I could have made that statement, I believe that’s what I had in mind,” he said today. This is an explicit admission that he’s rationalizing his prior statement in order to fit with what he now believes.
What Gruber is hoping is that the GOP Congress is as “stupid” as the Democrat voters he helped to dupe in 2009-10, and continues to try and dupe.
Good luck with that.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member