Here’s the author’s defense of Gruber regarding the words that angered many people: “The stupidity of the American People”
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Since people know so little about public policy in general and health-care policy in particular, they tend to have incoherent views. In health care and other areas, they want to enjoy generous benefits while paying low taxes and don’t know enough details to reconcile those irreconcilable preferences. Gruber’s error here is that, by describing this as “stupidity” rather than a “lack of knowledge,” he moves from lamenting an unfortunate problem both parties must work around to condescending to the public in an unattractive way.
Ah, the old “What’s the big deal you provincial morons?” defense.
I knew it would rear it’s ugly head.
The author of this piece of garbage is every bit as contemptuous, condescending and sanctimonious as Mr. Gruber.
Gruber purposely misled and confused the CBO and the American people for this thing to pass. Period.
He should be fired by MIT, promptly.
In the midst of Gruber and Obamacare’s richly deserved comeuppance I should like to point out that the economics and logistics and of the plan were obvious and inevitable to anyone motivated and intelligent enough to grasp them from the off.
None of the finite resources, materials, manpower involved in health care nor insurance are free therefore Gruber’s rationale, however ‘controversial,’ is self-evident. Government will ration because it must ration, especially when the aforementioned resources vanish from the market due to a loss of profit motive.
LIES are evil!
Despite the “stupidity of the American people”, Obamacare was passed with the majority of Americans opposing it.
Is someone in a Republican administration had been caught admitting this kind of deception, would Chait be writing this kind of defense? No way in hell. Everything Bush said was nitpicked and misrepresented.
What is evil is a congress that passed a law they didn’t write and didn’t read.
This is banana republic stuff, where el comandante rules by decree and the pantomime congress ratifies his every hiccup and burp.
This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. So it’s written to do that.
Just meditate on that for a while.
Chait should have also included his “stammering for context”, because this justification clearly requires it....
Anyone who takes New York Magazine seriously deserves to be subjected to Chait’s bilge water. This article will convince no one who isn’t already a true believer.
May I be the first to point out that the Emperor has no clothes. The entire argument over Obamacare and the U.S. healthcare system is based on a myth and fraudulent argument.
To wit: The millions of people, citizens and non-citizens who had no insurance coverage were totally without healthcare. That was the big lie that was sold to generate demand for a revision of the healthcare system, one sixth of the economy. But it simply wasn’t the case. No one made the argument that there is a major difference between being insured and the delivery of healthcare.
If millions got no healthcare prior to Obamacare wouldn’t there have been statistics showing millions of death due to illnesses and accidents that weren’t treated? Wouldn’t there have been thousands, maybe millions, of bodies in the streets?
The fact is that every community in the country had a delivery system for healthcare to folks who weren’t insured through hospitals and clinics that furnished care to them based on need and their ability to pay. In fact, the poor and non-citizens got the best deal of all since their healthcare was usually delivered without deductibles and without requirement for payments.
So we have changed a working healthcare system that many people were OK with, for a pig in a poke which has been dictated to us by a few ‘experts’ who believe they know what is best for everyone. And so they lied.
But the biggest lie of all was that without insurance you couldn’t get any healthcare.