Opinion

Don’t Mince Words: Gruber Tapes Show President Obama Is A Liar

Jamie Weinstein Senior Writer
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President Barack Obama is a liar.

That’s the takeaway from Massachusetts Institute for Technology professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber’s video oeuvre of narcissistic honesty.

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies,” Gruber said in one of several videos recently uncovered of him explaining at forums and panels over the last several years how Obamacare was dishonestly sold to the public.

“In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said healthy people are going to pay in — if you made it explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed,” Gruber went on to say in the 2013 video. “Lack of transparency is a huge 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.”

“Economists have called for 40 years to get rid of the regressive, inefficient and expensive tax subsidy provided for employer provider health insurance,” Gruber said in another video, speaking at the Pioneer Institute in Boston in 2011.

“It turns out politically it’s really hard to get rid of,” he went on. “And the only way we could get rid of it was first by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people when we all know it’s a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.”

In truth, Obama’s serial dishonesty is not something we are only discovering now. The Gruber videos only buttress what has already been reported about Obama’s rampant mendacity in pushing his health care law on the American people. Last year, outlets like NBC and the Wall Street Journal reported that the president’s advisers knew millions of Americans would lose their health care plan at the very time President Obama was gallivanting around the country promising, “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan. Period.” (READ: Obama Lied, Bush Was Mystified)

“One former senior administration official said that as the law was being crafted by the White House and lawmakers, some White House policy advisers objected to the breadth of Mr. Obama’s ‘keep your plan’ promise,” the Wall Street Journal reported last year. “They were overruled by political aides, the former official said.”

“Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, ’40 to 67 percent’ of customers will not be able to keep their policy,” NBC reported last year. “That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.” (RELATED: Former Obama Adviser Says White House Considered Gruber An ‘Important Figure’, ‘The Man’)

Despite the spin of some liberal publications and pundits in the aftermath of the release of the Gruber videos, the MIT economist was a key force behind Obamacare. That’s why he was routinely referred by even liberal publications as “an architect” of Obama’s health care law. What he said repeatedly on the lecture circuit confirms what we know from reporting: Obama said whatever he had to in order to garner support for his signature domestic policy, truth be damned.

It’s not a nice thing to conclude the American president is a liar. But the facts lead where they lead.

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