{"id":22053,"date":"2014-12-08T18:22:22","date_gmt":"2014-12-08T23:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=22053"},"modified":"2014-12-08T18:22:22","modified_gmt":"2014-12-08T23:22:22","slug":"obamacares-stupid-voter-architect-to-testify-at-gop-hearing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/22053\/obamacares-stupid-voter-architect-to-testify-at-gop-hearing\/","title":{"rendered":"ObamaCare’s ‘Stupid Voter’ Architect to Testify at GOP Hearing"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday this week Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist and ObamaCare architect made infamous by a series of viral videos<\/a> confirming suspicions of deceptive lawmaking<\/a>, will appear before the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee.<\/p>\n

It won\u2019t be a pleasant meeting for Gruber.<\/p>\n

Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) has titled the hearing, \u201cExamining ObamaCare Transparency Failures.\u201d<\/p>\n

The biggest issue will be whether Issa and his fellow Republicans can get Gruber to confirm his previous statement that ObamaCare only grants insurance subsidies to people in states that operate their own health exchange. That\u2019s the central issue in the case going before the Supreme Court next spring, and if the justices accept it, much of ObamaCare could be gutted.<\/p>\n

Liberals are already trying to get ahead of any Gruber confessions under oath that could undermine their landmark domestic policy.<\/p>\n

In a long-read piece<\/a> at Politico, a former Democratic staffer tries to minimize the impact of Gruber\u2019s comments by first saying he wasn\u2019t involved in the policymaking process. That\u2019s a fair point.<\/p>\n

But then the staffer seems to completely confirm Gruber\u2019s main argument \u2013 that the disputed statutory language was deliberately concocted to confuse people who weren\u2019t in on the backroom political calculations.<\/p>\n

The Politico reporter sums up the staffer\u2019s argument this way: \u201cThe point of having the \u2018Balkanized\u2019 approach \u2013 state health exchanges plus a federal one for states that didn\u2019t build their own \u2013 was to appeal to centrist senators, he said, since most liberal Democrats would have been happy just to have a federal one.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the staffer explains it, \u201cNo one was willing to fall on their swords to make sure states ran their own exchanges.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, the text in the law that limits the flow of subsidies to state exchanges is nothing more than an Orwellian wordplay. It doesn\u2019t mean what it says. Rather, it\u2019s designed to give \u2018centrist\u2019 senators political cover for voting to do the exact opposite \u2013 give subsidies to everyone.<\/p>\n

Confused? Gruber isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

This new rationale sounds an awful lot like the \u201ctortured\u201d drafting of ObamaCare that takes advantage of the \u201cstupidity of the American voter\u201d that Gruber\u2019s been saying for years.<\/p>\n

Kudos for being honest. Now let\u2019s see if he will remain so under oath.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday this week Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist and ObamaCare architect made infamous by a series of viral videos confirming suspicions of deceptive lawmaking, will appear before the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee. It won\u2019t be a pleasant meeting for Gruber. Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) has titled the hearing, \u201cExamining ObamaCare Transparency […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[84,150,3308,1829,4613,35,2249,92],"class_list":["post-22053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-congress","tag-darrell-issa","tag-health","tag-insurance","tag-jonathan-gruber","tag-obamacare","tag-subsidy","tag-supreme-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22053"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22058,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22053\/revisions\/22058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}