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.
The entire piece was written to parse Gruber’s words in a tortured manner in order to JUSTIFY THEM.
Here’s his tortured defense of the NON-TRANSPARENCY statement of Gruber:
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Here is where media reports have most badly bungled Gruber’s point. They have treated his line about transparency as if he were describing the entire process of writing and passing the law. Media coverage has compounded the misimpression by cutting out the stammering in his remarks about transparency, treating each of them as a stand-alone thought. Even MSNBC played an edited version that began Gruber’s remarks with “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage ...”
But Gruber was not talking about passing the law in a non-transparent fashion. Conservatives believe the law was passed non-transparently, but nobody who supported it considers this anything but a bizarre description of one of the most drawn-out public and legislative debates in the history of Congress. Gruber was surely referring to the non-transparent mechanism of regulating insurance companies, causing them to charge less to the sick and more to the healthy, without Congress having to carry out those transfers through direct taxes.
Gruber is right about this, too. Suppose Congress had decided not to regulate insurers but instead charged higher taxes to healthy people, and wrote checks directly to sick people. People would have hated it, even though the popular mechanism Congress used instead does the very same thing.