Gruber Should Not Apologize

Gruber Should Not Apologize

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If you’re happy with your new health plan or, as promised by President Obama, you got to keep your unadulterated old plan, you can skip this article. And if you got to keep your beleaguered doctor and you’re delighted with Obamacare, step away from this commentary.

Apparently more than once, MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, a frequent visitor to the White House before the passage of Obamacare, said the following about this law:

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO (Congressional Budge Office) did not score the mandate as taxes. If the CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.”

“If it’s explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.”

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, it calls the stupidity of the American people or whatever. But … that was really, really critical to get the thing passed.”

Who us? Stupid? Is name calling what finally upsets us about the passage of this legislation? After the fact, the country is jumping all over Gruber demanding an apology for calling us stupid. But he’s not the one who should apologize for his opinions or outsmarting us. He can’t help his ivory tower beliefs that health care is a right, like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that the already overextended federal government should have an overwhelming presence in dishing out medical care. On the contrary, we should be fuming at the American institutions that kept us in the dark.

The first to fail is is the media. With the exception of “Special Report,” there was no reporting of the discussions or meetings that led up to the passage of this bill. We depend on journalists to give us the facts and happenings as they unfold. Gruber made these statements several times in front of different audiences before Obamacare was passed in 2010. Yet the first we hear of his designs on American health insurance is in the Fall of 2014.

The American Medical Association (AMA) fell completely under the spell of Obama when he paid them a surprise visit in 2009. What the news reported was booing by the doctors, but this was in reference to his statement that there would be no tort reform in the upcoming bill. Based on this reporting, any sane doctor reading the news would think that physicians were unhappy with the proposed legislation or at least questioning it. But no, the doctors were so impressed that the President would pay them a special visit that they rolled over and went along with this huge government takeover of health insurance policy. These doctors obviously weren’t smart enough to know how this legislation would affect our patients or our medical practices.

To remind you, every single Democrat voted for Obamacare and every single Republican voted against it. No one read the bill or even parts of it before the vote, speaking of ignorance. On political instinct, not knowledge, the Republicans didn’t like this bill. If they had studied it and led discussions, Congress might have spoken out against this “healthy people pay in” agenda.

We’ll never get an apology from President Obama, and yet he is the worst contributor to our stupidity. Going against his campaign promise that his administration would be completely “transparent,” this bill was written behind closed doors by people like Gruber with full access to the White House. There were no rolling C-SPAN cameras in sight. Ironically, White House tours were canceled to the public at this time. Nevertheless, Gruber was able to sneak in at least 20 times at the cost of deceiving America.

And the Supreme Court? Apparently they got it right and exposed Gruber’s new tax on American citizens. This is the dirty little fact that Gruber hid from us with plenty of help. The Justices don’t need to apologize for doing their job.

June 25, 2015