Jonathan Gruber Should Rethink His Notion of 'Stupidity'
Oh, really? That's how health insurance works. Since when have risk pools been too hard for us dumb yokels to understand?
But the most potentially damaging sound bite emerged back in July in a Gruber video from 2012. That's when he told another conference that Americans who need tax credits to help them pay for their premiums can receive them only for insurance purchased on "exchanges established by the state."
"If you're a state and you don't set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits," he said. By denying subsidies to those who didn't have exchanges, he said, lawmakers had hoped to coerce states into setting up their own exchanges.
Only 13 states have done so, yet the administration has been awarding tax credits to plans bought on the federal exchange by citizens in the other 37 states anyway.
Now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that claims the administration has been violating its own law. If the plaintiffs win, subsidies could unravel and take Obamacare with it.
Of course, Congress could fix it. But these days that's about as likely as House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi joining the National Rifle Association.
Yet, the administration argues, there is abundant evidence in the ACA's legislative history that lawmakers never intended to deprive citizens of health care if their states did not have an exchange.
So why did Gruber say it? In a phone interview with The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn last summer, he said he didn't remember. "I was speaking off-the-cuff," he told Cohn. "It was just a mistake."
After all, he pointed out, his projections of the law's impact always have assumed that all eligible people would get subsides, even though he did not assume that all states would run their own exchanges.
Gruber's own research undermines his reliability as a witness against the program he helped to create. The only one left looking stupid is him.
========
E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
(c) 2014 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
