Now President Obama dismisses him as just some guy who was "not on our staff" and had nothing to do with ObamaCare.
Oops:
We've been going to town in recent days with Gruber-related material, and it's important to understand why. While Gruber's words on his hit parade of videos have been illuminating, he really did not expose anything that many us hadn't already figured out years ago.
(Hat top to the
Daily Signal for the video find.)
We knew that Congress gamed the numbers to manipulate the CBO "scoring." We knew the White House was deceptive about the taxes hidden in the bill. We knew that messing around with insurance markets would wreak havoc with private-sector policies and costs, and that you couldn't guarantee coverage for everyone while mandating that everyone pay the same price without severely curtailing the quality of service and care.
These things are just economic impossibilities. Dumb liberals who know only politics and nothing about economics probably didn't understand this, but smart liberals like Gruber surely did, and they didn't hide these facts in internal discussions. Conservative media were all over these facts, but the mainstream media either ignored them, didn't understand them or simply accepted Democrat assurances that they weren't issues.
So what Gruber had really admitted here is that, yes, every conservative criticism of the economics of ObamaCare was correct, and yes, they knew it all back then, but they hid it because it was more important for them to get the bill passed and seize government control of health care markets than to address these very real issues.
When Obama pretends Gruber is persona non grata - when in fact he knows Gruber very well and was bragging about stealing his ideas eight years ago - Obama is running in horror from the exposure of his own complicity. The whole point of ObamaCare was to make health care a politically driven sector, rather than a market-driven sector. The Democrats didn't care what they had to do to make that happen, except to the extent that any particular detail was necessary to pass the bill. As long as the end result was that the government controls the game, the rest was mere details.
And of course, they were perfectly prepared to feed the public whatever Bolshevik was required to get the thing through Congress. They didn't care in the slightest if it was the truth, or even if the public bought it (which the public did not), so long as it greased the skids sufficiently to get a bill to Obama's desk.
The danger of Jonathan Gruber to the Democrats is that he absolutely was on the inside and saw all this - and it's not as if he decided to do a mea culpa and sent on Fox News to confess it all. These videos were shot when he was speaking in front of largely friendly audiences and he thought his words would not be exposed to the broader public. It was wink wink nod nod you know what we really did right? If Democrats can't discredit Gruber now, they all get exposed with him.
And they can't discredit him when Obama himself was admitting eight years ago that Gruber heavily influenced his own thinking on health care. The jig is up. Not only ObamaCare the complete disaster many of us predicted it would be, but they knew this would happen and they lied about it. Now one of them has been caught admitting it, and the rest of them desperately want to run, but they can't because they're busted.
By the way, in the upcoming Supreme Court hearing on King v. Burwell - the one where liberals claim the ObamaCare language limiting subsidies only to those who bought their policies on the 14 state-established exchanges was a mere "typo," - a video will come into play in which one of the architects of ObamaCare admits that the language was written that way very intentionally to incentivize states to create their own exchanges. That would be this video:
Have a nice day.
