Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber said that the health care law was going to sting at first for American small businesses.
Gruber currently awaits a call-back from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to give more testimony about how Obamacare was designed. An overlooked quote from an interview Gruber gave with a local Boston public television station highlights the deception that went into the writing process: Gruber knew that Obamacare was going to hurt small businesses, despite the Obama administration’s claims to the contrary.
WGBH reported in May on a Cleveland pub owner’s frustration with the 20 percent health insurance rate hike his business saw due to Obamacare. Gruber was interviewed, defending the law, months before his comments on “the stupidity of the American voter” and the health law’s deceptions hit the pages of The Daily Caller. (RELATED: Gruber: Obamacare Will NOT Be Affordable).
“We’re in a transition period, says Jonathan Gruber, a health economist at MIT,” WGBH reported. “It will sting at first, he says, but, ‘once we’re in this system, we’re not going to see that year-to-year variability we’ve seen traditionally. We’re not going to see these huge swings year to year — one of your employees gets sick and all of a sudden your rates double. That goes away now.'”
Nevertheless, the Cleveland pub owner said that the designers of Obamacare “botched it.”
Gruber’s admission that Obamacare would sting for small businesses fits in with other statements that he made, whether praising an anti-business left-wing political movement or calling new taxes on Americans “trivial.”
Gruber said in 2011 that “the Occupy movement has a good, strong message and I don’t want them to muddy it up … [by] protesting economics” after some students walked out of an economics class as part of Occupy Boston demonstrations because a teacher was accused of “conservative bias.”
Gruber said that “basic economics is fundamentally right wing. … It’s not about bias; it’s how the free market works” and that to eliminate bias in teaching one must “acknowledge [that fact] and … approach things even-handedly.”
Gruber said at a Center for American Progress event with Democratic politician Martha Coakley that the penalty levied by Obamacare’s individual mandate for uninsured Americans was “trivial.”
“[T]he Congressional Budget Committee estimates that about 1 percent of the population will end up paying this penalty. This is not a broad new tax on the middle class. It is trivial,” Gruber said.