WhatFinger

Death blow.

Bombshell video: In 2012, ObamaCare architect Jonathin Gruber argued that there are no federal exchange subsidies

By Robert Laurie ——--July 25, 2014

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On Tuesday, a three judge panel from the Washington DC circuit court ruled that - as written - ObamaCare only allows subsidies for insurance policies purchased on state exchanges. The law is perfectly clear about this, so it should be a no brainer. It states that subsidies are only legal to exchanges ""established by a State," and then it goes on to define a state as the 50 states and Washington D.C. This was done - by Democrats - purposefully. The goal was to place pressure on Republican Governors who would be forced to fight for an exchange or watch their state's insurance rates skyrocket.
Then the states called their bluff. Only 14 states were actually foolish enough to establish exchanges. So, Democrats are now trying to argue that the law has been misinterpreted. They say that - despite the very specific language - they never intended to limit subsidies to state exchanges. Unfortunately, that argument just got a whole lot harder to make. Last night, Reason.com introduced its readers to Jonathan Gruber. Gruber was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and one of the chief architects of what became known as "RomneyCare." As Dems love to remind you, RomneyCare was the model for ObamaCare. Later, when ObamaCare was being designed, the Obama administration paid Gruber $400,000 to consult. He even claims to have written part of the law.
After the law passed, in 2011 and throughout 2012, multiple states sought his expertise to help them understand their options regarding the choice to set up their own exchanges. During that period of time, in January of 2012, Gruber told an audience at Noblis, a technical management support organization, that tax credits—the subsidies available for health insurance—were only available in states that set up their own exchanges.
Unfortunately for the administration, there's a video of that speech ...and President Obama is not going to like it. It's a long clip, but at the 31 minute mark Gruber is asked about the state exchanges and he says:
"Yeah, so these health insurance exchanges ...will be these new shopping places. And they'll be the places that people go to get their subsidies for health insurance. In the law it says that if the states don't provide them, the federal backstop will. The federal government has been sort of slow in putting up its backstop, I think partly because they want to sort of squeeze the states to do it. What’s important to remember politically about this is if you're a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits - but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying to your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that that's a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges. But, you know, once again the politics can get ugly around this."
In other words, according to the man who helped create the law, no state exchange means no subsidies to citizens of the state. This means that any state without its own exchange will - by design - see astronomically high insurance rates, and it was done in a Democrat effort to force the states to comply. ObamaCare's death blow just got much harder to ignore.

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Robert Laurie——

Robert Laurie’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain.com

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