Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber said that health-care costs would go up if Congress passed Hillary Clinton’s health reform bill in 1993.
Gruber said in 2009, while he was writing Obamacare with the White House, that the health care law would not control costs and would not be affordable, despite President Obama’s public statements to the contrary. (RELATED: Gruber: Affordable Care Act Will NOT Be Affordable).
“{T]here are no cost controls in these proposals,” Gruber said in a policy brief. “Because this bill’s about coverage. Which is good! Why should we hold 48 million uninsured people hostage to the fact that we don’t yet know how to control costs in a politically acceptable way? Let’s get the people covered and then let’s do cost control.”
Gruber was straightforward during the Clinton administration when talking about “Hillarycare,” a failed health-care reform bill that rose from the same Democratic Party circles that later gave us Obamacare.
“The honest truth is, I think we haven’t quite figured out what caused health care costs to go up so much over the last thirty years. I don’t think we’ve really found the magic bullet to drag them down,” Gruber told Congress as a member of a group called the Alliance for Health Reform. “So I think on the other side you’re bringing in 37 million people who didn’t have health insurance before, so that drives health care costs up.”
“My guess is they’re probably going to go up. Health-care costs are probably going to go up.”
More than 15 years later, Gruber still hadn’t figured out how to control costs.
“So what’s different this time? Why are we closer than we’ve ever been before? Because there are no cost controls in these proposals,” Gruber said in a lecture transcribed in a 2009 policy brief. “Because this bill’s about coverage. Which is good! Why should we hold 48 million uninsured people hostage to the fact that we don’t yet know how to control costs in a politically acceptable way? Let’s get the people covered and then let’s do cost control.”