Always-gabbing Gruber tells GOP how to kill ObamaCare

Jonathan Gruber is truly the gift who keeps on giving for Republicans. Every time he opens his mouth, he reveals something about the true nature of Democrat governance that further feeds the public's distaste for it.

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And sometimes he does even more than that. We already know, because of the videos of Gruber saying so, that Democrats intentionally misled the Congressional Budget Office about the true costs of ObamaCare - since they needed a strategy to get past the stupidity of the American people in order to pass it! But in the latest Gruber video, this one recorded in 2012, he basically gave Republicans a roadmap for how to get rid of the law even if they can't repeal it. He said:

The entire law just craters if there's not someone in the White House who cares about making it work. So you don't need active repeal. You just need active ignorance. Letting it wither on the vine. And that may be enough. That's the real threat.

(I put the word "ignorance" in italics because he pronounced it ig-NOR-ance, by which I think he meant the act of ignoring, as opposed to being ignorant. Academics are so eloquent!) Now Gruber is revealing more than he realizes here. Yes, there are many administrative ways to kill the law. At one point Mitt Romney said that, if elected, he would immediately grant waivers to all 50 states. That would be one way to do it. Simply not bothering to manage it properly would be another. And by pointing this out, what Gruber is really admitting is that - contrary to the insistence of many Democrats - ObamaCare absolutely is government-run health care. For all their talk about how it's just a bunch of private-sector exchanges, the truth is that private-sector insurance never works the way ObamaCare forces these exchanges to work - because it would go out of business if it did. So sure, it would be possible for a Republican president to essentially kill ObamaCare simply by neglecting to run it in the way Democrats want it run. But that's not a solution. The right thing to do is to not only repeal ObamaCare, but to replace it with changes to health care finance that return the economic power to patients and their doctors. There are a lot of good proposals already in Congress to do this. H.R. 2300, sponsored by Georgia Republican Tom Price, is one of my favorites. But there are other good ones too. If we win the presidency in 2016 and keep control of both the House and the Senate, we can and should repeal ObamaCare. I see no reason we shouldn't use reconciliation in the Senate to repeal it with somewhere between 51 and 59 votes if it comes to that, since that's the exact same trick Harry Reid used to pass it in 2010. Then we can set about fixing health care the way it really needs to be fixed. But in the event we get a Republican president but don't retain control of Congress, well, it sure will be fun to listen to Democrats yelping about how the president shouldn't be using executive power to mess with the law. Because they would never do that.