Tag: jonathan gruber
Republicans Still Think You’re Stupid

Republicans Still Think You’re Stupid

The only time Republicans admit what they’re really up to is when they attack Democrats for doing the exact same thing they’re either currently doing or have already done.

As soon as Senate Democrats released the executive summary of a report detailing the CIA’s torture regime under the George W. Bush administration, a Fox News host was already calling it a distraction. “I find it ironic that they’re dropping this report on the same day that Gruber’s testifying, to knock that out of the front pages,” Outnumbered’s Jesse Watters speculated.

Ah, Jonathan Gruber. The #Benghazi of all #Benghazis.

He’s the real issue that America needs to focus on now that the election is over, and Republicans can stop pretending that they care about ISIS, or Ebola, or governing.

If you exist outside of the conservative media wormhole, you’ve probably vaguely heard of Gruber. But you may not be aware of why.

Earlier this winter, a conservative investment advisor dug up tapes of Gruber serving up a Penthouse Letters-quality fantasy to a right wing that sensed a renewed chance to gut the Affordable Care Act, with the help of an offensively specious reading of the law — one that’s made its way to the Supreme Court.

In these tapes, Gruber personifies the right’s worst caricature of the liberal elite. He brags about using the “stupidity of the American voter” to get some of the law’s least popular features — like the individual mandate and the “Cadillac” tax on insurance policies worth more than $25,000 a year — sneaked into the bill.

It’s awful stuff for defenders of the Affordable Care Act, including me, who’ve relied on Gruber’s pedigree of having worked for George W. Bush and Mitt Romney to make the case that Republicans oppose the law purely out of partisan spite. Some on the left have been warning against Gruber for years, for failing to disclose his contracts with the government and his conservative tendencies. But his explanation of how “winners” under the law would vastly outnumber those who lost policies they liked was taken as gospel by many ACA proponents. And his quote describing GOP opposition to expanding Medicaid as “awesome in its evilness” was repeated by Paul Krugman and retweeted by liberals throughout the land.

So… checkmate.

Except that what Gruber said was pretty much BS. (Please verify this, PolitiFact.)

Passage of the Affordable Care Act was excruciatingly transparent. For months upon months, the Senate Committee on Finance met publicly to hash out the law (with far too much input from lobbyists), hoping to win over even one Republican supporter with a proposal that cloned an approach to health care reform conceived almost entirely by the right.

Democrats hedged on whether the individual mandate was a tax. But when the Supreme Court saved the law, it clearly labeled it that way. And Republicans didn’t make a big issue of this fact in the 2012 presidential campaign, because they’d nominated the first guy who ever signed an individual mandate into law.

Even it it weren’t BS, who cares? Gruber’s stray comments that seemed to support the Republican argument that red states can deny tax credits to their citizens doesn’t erase how his models and commentary directly contradicted their point.

But he’s an architect!

You can call Gruber the architect of Obamacare and Romneycare. I did. And what does that change?

An “architect” of the Iraq War said it would pay for itself. The “architects” of the Bush tax cuts said they would be good for the economy, and we got the first decade without job growth in 70 years. And Republicans are vowing to use the same voodoo math that justified the lowest tax rates on the rich in a century again — even as inequality hits its worst point since before the Great Depression.

Can the Supreme Court invoke the “architect” clause to reverse these actual disasters?

But it’s about transparency! Republicans scream, right before insisting that a report detailing torture not be released.

This is a party that cares so much about transparency that it went to the Supreme Court to make sure Dick Cheney wouldn’t have to disclose which energy overlords he met with in the White House.

Of course, Gruber is a distraction. A distraction from reports showing that 10.3 million Americans have gained health insurance, health spending growth is at a 53-year low, hospitals are saving more money and lives, people have more freedom to work or not work and the projected cost of health care for taxpayers has shrunk faster than anyone could have imagined.

Republicans suggested that Obamacare would destroy the economy. Instead we’re in the middle of the best job growth of this century.

Study after study shows the Affordable Care Act is working. It isn’t perfect. People lost plans and doctors, as they did before the law. But now they have the security of knowing they cannot be denied coverage due to insurer discrimination, and at least 80 percent of what they pay is going toward actual health care. And the GOP’s desperate attempts to talk about anything but how the law is working may be our best proof of this success.

After six years of promises, Republicans still haven’t put together any Obamacare alternative, because they know it will invite every criticism they’ve been making of the president since 2009. Instead, they’re hoping the Supreme Court will act as the Republican National Committee offshoot it has become to rob middle-class workers of tax credits they need to buy health insurance.

The Gruber hearings disappointed some on the right.

“Perhaps conservatives were better off when the mainstream press was largely ignoring Gruber-gate,” Hot Air‘s Noah Rothman wrote  after the media didn’t offer any of the anti-Gruber backwash that conservatives have been ricocheting around their echo chamber, as if anyone but the people who already hated the law even cared.

That’s the problem with distractions. Eventually people may wonder what you’re distracting them from.

Screenshot: YouTube

Obamacare Adviser Apologizes To Lawmakers For Controversial Comments: ‘I Behaved Badly’

Obamacare Adviser Apologizes To Lawmakers For Controversial Comments: ‘I Behaved Badly’

By Noam N. Levey, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor who worked on the Affordable Care Act, apologized to members of Congress on Tuesday for a series of controversial comments he made about the law, which Republicans have seized on to attack the health care legislation.

“I behaved badly, and I will have to live with that,” Gruber told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. “But my own inexcusable arrogance is not a flaw in the Affordable Care Act. The ACA is a milestone accomplishment for our nation that already has provided millions of Americans with health insurance.”

Gruber, an economist who advised the White House during the development of the law in 2009 and 2010, was captured in a series of videos speaking disparagingly about voters and the development of the measure.

In one video, he said passage of the law was only possible because of the “stupidity” of the American voter.

In another, he suggested that residents of states that rely on the federal government to operate insurance marketplaces are not eligible for tax subsidies, a key tool in the law that allows millions of Americans to buy health coverage on these marketplaces.

The comments have become a cause celebre for Republicans, who have labeled Gruber an architect of the law, a characterization he disputed Tuesday.

Gruber’s comments have also given ammunition to a legal challenge to the tax credits.

There is widespread agreement among the law’s architects that it allows all low- and moderate-income Americans to receive the tax credits whether they live in states that are operating their own insurance marketplace or live in states that rely on the federal government’s.

But critics assert that language in the law suggests the credits should be limited to state-run marketplaces. The Supreme Court is now considering a lawsuit that could take away credits from millions of Americans in states that do not operate their own marketplaces.

Gruber said Tuesday he does not believe that the credits should be limited.

“I have a long-standing and well-documented belief that health care reform legislation in general, and the ACA in particular, must include mechanisms for residents in all states to obtain tax credits,” he said, noting that the economic models he developed assumed these credits would be available everywhere.

Gruber also noted that contrary to his earlier statements, the law was not developed secretly. “Reasonable people can disagree about the merits of these policies, but it is completely clear that these issues were debated thoroughly during the drafting and passage of the ACA,” he said.

Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-A) and other Republicans nevertheless kept up their attacks on Gruber for what Issa termed “arrogance and deceptions surrounding the passage and implementation of Obamacare.”

AFP Photo/Joe Raedle

Imagine A World Without ‘Obamacare’

Imagine A World Without ‘Obamacare’

Obamacare is at a record level of unpopularity even as it is helping many millions of people in exactly the ways its creators intended. This is an epic branding disaster, but also something more profound: a failure of vision and linguistics that has made it easy for conservatives to target a president and weaponize a needed law.

Most federal programs of this magnitude are meant to become national institutions that last for decades, even centuries. And they have names that reflect those aspirations — neutral, patriotic, suggestive of universal concern. If you look them up, you can find out which president signed them into law. But you can’t tell from their names.

Do we have FDR Security? No, we have Social Security. Do we have Johnsoncare and Johnsonaid? The Kennedy Corps? The Clinton Children’s Health Insurance Program? The Ford Income Tax Credit? The Nixon Anti-Pollution Agency? No, no, no, no, no and no.

We are now faced with “Obamacare,” a nickname invented by Republicans as an insult. President Obama has tried to detoxify it (“that’s OK, because I do care,” he said in 2012), but it remains a nom de guerre few besides Obama could love. His low approval ratings are no doubt contributing to the disaffection for the law itself. What Republican president — or Democratic one, for that matter — would feel ownership of a program called “Obamacare,” no matter what it does? Even if it were popular?

And it is far from beloved, at least in the abstract. An all-time low of 37 percent approve of the law and a record high of 56 percent disapprove, “even as it has had obvious success in reducing the uninsured rate,” Gallup reported this month. The negativity also persists even though majorities continue to favor many parts of the law, among them requirements that insurance companies sell policies to people regardless of their medical conditions and let parents keep adult children on their plans until age 26.

The awkwardly named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act gave such protections equal billing. Shortened to the Affordable Care Act, that element was lost. Furthermore, given constantly rising health costs, the focus on affordability invited derision. Shortened even further to its initials, ACA, we have a title that to most people signifies nothing at all. And thus we arrive at Obamacare, the only short, descriptive identifier in the arena.

Frank Luntz, the Republican wordsmith who came up with phrases like “death tax” (for estate tax) and “energy exploration” (for oil drilling), says he would have called the law The Healthcare Security Act. “No one is against security,” he told me in an email. The ACA architects could have built on a name like that or on something people already like, such as MedicareUSA. Or how about the USACares Act (which as I write is available as a dot-com website for $2,000 from Go Daddy)? Clearly the administration was not thinking legacy, or even hashtag.

What’s in a name? More than you might think. In a 2013 CNBC poll, some respondents were asked about the Affordable Care Act and others about Obamacare. Only 37 percent were opposed to the ACA compared with 46 percent opposed to Obamacare. Similarly, in an NBC News/Marist poll of registered Kentucky voters last spring, only 33 percent had a favorable view of Obamacare while 57 percent had an unfavorable view. When they were asked their impression of “Kynect,” the online state insurance marketplace, 29 percent viewed it favorably and only 22 percent negatively (the rest were unsure or hadn’t heard of it). “Call it something else, and the negatives drop,” Marist pollster Lee Miringoff said at the time.

A big, ambitious program needs a solid, enduring name, not one that polarizes the nation, decimates its sponsor party in every midterm, and creates fertile ground for both Beltway-fed stormlets like Grubergate (ACA advisor Jonathan Gruber’s wildly inappropriate comments about “the stupidity of the American voter”) and highly threatening legal challenges like the one pending at the Supreme Court over subsidies for low-income policyholders.

All of that notwithstanding, my sense is that Obamacare, with its roots in the conservative ideas of market competition and personal responsibility, will endure and be a key part of Obama’s legacy. It’s not too late to give future presidents a way to become more comfortable with the law — a “permission structure,” as Obama once called it. In his first campaign, when some people were reluctant to vote for a seemingly exotic newcomer, the permission structure involved endorsements from people like Ted Kennedy and Colin Powell. For Obamacare, it may be as simple and as complicated as substituting a new name for one that is guaranteed to turn off half the country or more.

Follow Jill Lawrence on Twitter @JillDLawrence. To find out more about Jill Lawrence and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

AFP Photo/Karen Bleier

Want more political news and analysis? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!