Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber said Tuesday that he regrets saying that aspects of Obamacare needed to be concealed from the public due to the “stupidity of the American voter.”
“Do you stand by the comments in that video?,” MSNBC host Ronan Farrow asked Gruber, referring to a video of Gruber explaining how a lack of transparency helped Obamacare pass into law. (RELATED: Gruber: Lack of Transparency Was Key Because ‘Stupidity of the American Voter’ Would Have Killed Obamacare).
“The comments in the video were made at an academic conference,” Gruber said. “I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately and I regret having made those comments.”
Farrow then argued on Gruber’s behalf that Gruber’s argument was more “nuanced” than people can even appreciate.
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that,” said Gruber in the video.
“In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit 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… Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not,” Gruber said then.
Gruber is an MIT professor and was a top Obama administration consultant during the writing of Obamacare.