7/25/2014

Obamacare: Jonathan Gruber blatantly lying about whether federally run health insurance exchanges get a subsidy

It is rare for a prominent academic to so blatantly lie repeatedly for purely political purposes.  Unfortunately, for MIT's Jonathan Gruber there are videos to prove it.  Here is a video of Gruber in January 2012 where he makes it completely clear that only state run insurance exchanges get federal subsidies (see discussion starting at 31:55 in video):


JONATHAN GRUBER: 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.
It is crystal clear that the subsidy was limited to only state run insurance exchanges to force states to set up their own exchanges.

Well, that was then and this is now.  This past week on MSNBC Gruber can be seen claiming that there was never any intention to limit federal subsidies to state run exchanges and that the exclusion of the subsidy was just a result of an unintentional "typo" (video available here, transcript from Grabien).
MATTHEWS: "Why would Democrats put in a poison pill that says, 'oh, if you don't have a state exchange you can't give subsidies and you can't have the individual mandate so the bill is dead.' Why do that? Where is the logic?" 
GRUBER: "Someone wrote today a clever thing. When we fight about the Constitution we wonder what the framers really mean. We don't have to wonder. We know what the framers meant. We can ask them. We can go to the people who wrote it and say did you ever intend this as a poison pill or is it a typo every single one says it's a typo? And every single one of them will say this is just a typo. So there is no mystery here. There is no wondering about original intent in writing the law. This is just a typo. And if the courts pass it and it makes it to the Supreme Court, we are talking about 7 million Americans who would become uninsured because of this typo, if they really interpret it this way. It's just crazy."
Gruber is racking up a long list of whoopers:  promises that Obamacare would "for sure" lower health insurance costs, hiding that he was being paid $400,000 from the Obama administration to help work on and promote Obamacare while pretending to be a purely independent analyst, and possibly changing his positions on health care issues after he started working for the Obama administration.

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