Obamacare spinmaster Jonathan Gruber blamed President Trump on Sunday for some of the failures of President Obama’s health care law.
Gruber, an MIT economics professor who is considered one of the architects of Obamacare, made the bold claim during an interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”
While discussing the House’s passage this week of a Trump-backed bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, Wallace pointed to statistics showing that health care premiums have skyrocketed as insurance companies are fleeing some markets.
Premiums under Obamacare went up 24 percent last year, and the average number of insurers in each marketplace fell from 5.9 to 3.9, Wallace noted.
“Look, and who’s fault is this? Before President Trump was elected there were no counties in America that did not have an insurer. Since President Trump has been elected, and massive…,” Gruber responded.
“Wait, you’re going to blame the problems of Obamacare on President Trump?” Wallace interjected.
Gruber went on to claim that Trump has undercut the open enrollment program in Obamacare and “doesn’t honor the obligations this law makes to insurers.”
“As a result premiums are going up and insurers are exiting,” he said.
Gruber has reason to defend Obamacare at all costs given that his career and reputation are staked to the law.
Gruber became a household name in 2014, as Obamacare went into effect, after videos surfaced of him speaking candidly about how the Obama administration intentionally misled the American public about certain aspects of the bill.
“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,” he said during one health care conference.
At another event, Gruber admitted that the Obama administration pushed through the so-called Cadillac tax, a tax on certain premium health care plans, “by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we know it’s a tax on people who hold these insurance plans.”
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