By Robert Laurie —— Bio and Archives July 25, 2014
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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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