Fancy that:
Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, is making himself a household name, and not in a good way. A series of videos have emerged in recent days showing Mr. Gruber—an architect of the Affordable Care Act—telling college audiences that major parts of the law were designed purposely to mask its true cost to individual Americans.
As Mr. Gruber put it, speaking last year at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”
The audiences laughed away in their superiority, confident that others were the dumb ones who were fooled, notwithstanding that no Republicans in Congress voted for the law and so were not fooled.
Yet the people in the audiences were the ones who were fooled since they are the young healthy people compelled to buy insurance to subsidize others.
And they are fooled because that burden is temporarily disguised by forcing insurance companies to cover "children" on their parents' policies through age 26.
Now that I think about it, it is rather funny.
Yeah, It's. The.
Also note that Gruber sided with the often derided (by Democrats) Republican observation that you can't really tax corporations since they pass that cost on to their customers.
More importantly, he verifies that the law meant what it said--only people going through state exchanges for Obamacare qualify for subsidies, in order to push states to cooperate (as I've repeatedly said was obvious and a common tactic).
Yeah, who is looking stupid now?
