House Democrats reveal secret plan to force vote on debt limit hikeįirst Republic Bank collapse spurs fears for banking system, broader economy This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. ObamaCare architect: I regret ‘stupidity of the American voter’ comment TagsĬopyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. The economist, who helped design a Massachusetts law that inspired ObamaCare, said he wished “we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.” The clip is generating significant attention in conservative media.

“If you had a law that made it explicit that healthy people are going to pay in and sick people are going to get subsidies, it would not have passed,” he added. “If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies,” Gruber said. Gruber made the comment while discussing how the law was “written in a tortured way” to avoid a bad score from the Congressional Budget Office. He suggested that voters would have rejected ObamaCare if the penalties for going without health insurance were interpreted as taxes, either by budget analysts or the public. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.” “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber said.

He suggested that many lawmakers and voters didn’t know what was in the law or how its financing worked, and that this helped it win approval. In a clip unearthed Sunday, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Jonathan Gruber appears on a panel and discusses how the reform earned enough votes to pass. An architect of the federal healthcare law said last year that a “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter” helped Congress approve ObamaCare.

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