Watch Obamacare Architect Jonathan Gruber Admit in 2012 That Subsidies Were Limited t

[toubab]

http://reason.com/blog/2014/07/24/watch-obamacare-architect-jonathan-grube

"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.

A video of the presentation, posted on YouTube, was unearthed tonight by Ryan Radia at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank which has participated in the legal challenge to the IRS rule allowing subsidies in federal exchanges. Here’s what Gruber says.

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. [emphasis added]

Here’s the video, which according to YouTube's date stamp was uploaded by Noblis on January 20, 2012. The relevant passage starts around minute 31."

Lying weasels are changing their tune now that the fat is in the fire.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Toubab is always ready to sacrifice health care for the working poor in the name of his ideological purity.
:nods:

 

[toubab]

Toubab is always ready to sacrifice health care for the working poor in the name of his ideological purity.
:nods:

The kind of healthcare provided by Obamacare sucks, but even if it didn't, the law is the law, and the law is clear. Watch what the asshole who helped write the law says at around 31:40 in the video. He now takes the opposite position, now that there's a lawsuit in the matter, and the law is probably doomed if he says now what he said on tape in 2012. Lying piece of shit. I'm glad somebody found this tape.

I want to see this clusterfuck overturned so there's a chance for real reform, preferably something like Medicare for all.

 

[Wanderer0327]

Ouch! The money quotes come from just after the 32 minute mark.

"If you are a state and you don't set up an exchange, your citizens don't get the tax credits. But your citizens still pay the taxes which support this bill."

Well, that kind of video evidence is pretty damning for the whole tax credit issue.

 

[RobDownSouth]

The kind of healthcare provided by Obamacare sucks, but even if it didn't, the law is the law, and the law is clear. Watch what the asshole who helped write the law says at around 31:40 in the video. He now takes the opposite position, now that there's a lawsuit in the matter, and the law is probably doomed if he says now what he said on tape in 2012. Lying piece of shit. I'm glad somebody found this tape.

I want to see this clusterfuck overturned so there's a chance for real reform, preferably something like Medicare for all.

It's an improvement over the old failed system, an evolutionary step on the road to single-payer.

 

[toubab]

Ouch! The money quotes come from just after the 32 minute mark.

"If you are a state and you don't set up an exchange, your citizens don't get the tax credits. But your citizens still pay the taxes which support this bill."

Well, that kind of video evidence is pretty damning for the whole tax credit issue.

If that isn't convincing evidence to the courts, I don't know what would be.

 

[toubab]

It's an improvement over the old failed system, an evolutionary step on the road to single-payer.

The real winner under Obamacare is the insurance industry. I noticed you didn't respond to the thread I started on the GAO sting on Obamacare that proved how ridiculously easy it is to scam the government out of money under this fucked up system. The insurance industry executives who saw that must have laughed their asses off, realizing how much of the taxpayers' money they must be getting illegally.

 

[RobDownSouth]

The real winner under Obamacare is the insurance industry. I noticed you didn't respond to the thread I started on the GAO sting on Obamacare that proved how ridiculously easy it is to scam the government out of money under this fucked up system. The insurance industry executives who saw that must have laughed their asses off, realizing how much of the taxpayers' money they must be getting illegally.

Must've been a boring thread if I didn't reply to it.

Either that or I couldn't give a shit.

And yes, the insurance industry profits when more people sign up.

Such is capitalism.

Nothing's perfect in this life.

 

[toubab]

Must've been a boring thread if I didn't reply to it.

Either that or I couldn't give a shit.

And yes, the insurance industry profits when more people sign up.

Such is capitalism.

Nothing's perfect in this life.

I don't know how any intelligent person could find that GAO report boring or not give a shit about it. It was shocking.

 

[Wanderer0327]

If that isn't convincing evidence to the courts, I don't know what would be.

There's no question that the testimony of Gruber in the video is authentic and a point-in-time snapshot of what the intent behind the statute was. If that makes it in at SCOTUS (and I see no reason that it wouldn't) then this issue is closed and the IRS rule is struck down.

 

[toubab]

There's no question that the testimony of Gruber in the video is authentic and a point-in-time snapshot of what the intent behind the statute was. If that makes it in at SCOTUS (and I see no reason that it wouldn't) then this issue is closed and the IRS rule is struck down.

That should be the case. But John Roberts is a tricky one.

 

[RobDownSouth]

I don't know how any intelligent person could find that GAO report boring or not give a shit about it. It was shocking.

You'll have to forgive me if the things I get outraged about tend to be different from the things you get outraged about.
:nods:

 

[toubab]

You'll have to forgive me if the things I get outraged about tend to be different from the things you get outraged about.
:nods:

Massive fraud involving taxpayer money is worth getting outraged about.

 

[Wanderer0327]

That should be the case. But John Roberts is a tricky one.

Actually Kennedy is the one to consider on this issue rather than Roberts. I don't like the NFIB v. Sebelius ruling that the individual mandate is viable as an exercise of Congress power to tax. I did appreciate the part of the ruling striking down the forced Medicaid expansion though. But as regards the penalty equals tax portion, I can kinda understand how he got there. There was a very real ambiguity in what the word "penalty" meant in terms of Congressional authority under the Constitution. But there is no ambiguity here. This is an IRS rule which runs contrary to black-letter law, and with this kind of testimonial to support the black-letter law as unambiguous, the rule goes down.

 

[toubab]

Actually Kennedy is the one to consider on this issue rather than Roberts. I don't like the NFIB v. Sebelius ruling that the individual mandate is viable as an exercise of Congress power to tax. I did appreciate the part of the ruling striking down the forced Medicaid expansion though. But as regards the penalty equals tax portion, I can kinda understand how he got there. There was a very real ambiguity in what the word "penalty" meant in terms of Congressional authority under the Constitution. But there is no ambiguity here. This is an IRS rule which runs contrary to black-letter law, and with this kind of testimonial to support the black-letter law as unambiguous, the rule goes down.

There was plenty of evidence, including dozens of times from the president's own mouth, on tape, that the penalty was not a tax. Roberts disregarded all of it.

Why do you say Kennedy is the one to consider on this issue?

 

[KingOrfeo]

From Salon:

Friday, Jul 25, 2014 11:44 AM EDT

Obamacare’s non-smoking gun: Conservatives’ new, ridiculous claim that Obamacare is a sham

Conservatives say a 2012 speech by a MIT economist proves the ACA is fraudulent. Here's the real story

Simon Maloy

The latest legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act rests on a simple, absurd argument: Congressional Democrats, when they drafted the bill, deliberately tucked a little bit of statutory sabotage into their own legislation that would enable opponents of health care reform to blow the whole thing up.

The plaintiffs in Halbig v. Burwell contend that a single, sloppily written passage of the bill shows that Congress intended to deny subsidies to consumers purchasing insurance on exchanges set up by the federal government. If this were the case, then Democrats knowingly handed to every Republican governor in the country the tools to ensure the law’s failure – by opting to have a feds set up exchanges in their states, those governors would have made it impossible for residents to purchase insurance.

Supporters of the ACA say this is nonsense: the full text of the legislation makes clear that Congress intended to have the subsidies go to everyone, regardless of who was responsible for building the exchanges.

Well, now some excitable conservatives and libertarians think they’ve found proof of Congress’ intent to deny health subsidies to more than half the country: a 2012 speech by an academic involved in the crafting of the law.

The academic in question is MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who, as pretty much everyone is observing today, was an “architect” of the Affordable Care Act. The Competitive Enterprise Institute posted video of a January 2012 speech Gruber gave in which he said this:

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.

Caught red-handed! Obamacare goes down! Score one for freedom! Right…? A lot of conservatives seem to think so.

Gruber’s speech “suggests the falsity of the administration’s claim that this was a glitch and not a feature,” writes Fox News’ Chris Stirewalt. “If enough judges (or more likely Justices) agree with Gruber’s assessment, subsidies could be dropped from the federal exchange,” observes Breitbart News. “It is now quite untenable to argue that interpreting Obamacare in accordance with its plain language defeats the purpose of the law,” declare the legal minds at Powerline. Gruber “suggests not that the law’s exclusion of federal subsidies is a ‘drafting error,’ but a fully-intended incentive structure in order to convince states to take up the burden of creating their own state exchanges,” reports the Daily Caller.

So is this MIT professor’s speech a good indicator of Congress’ intent, as so many conservatives want to believe? Not really. Gruber, his prestigious “Obamacare architect” title notwithstanding, is very conspicuously not and elected member of Congress, nor was a Congressional staffer.

Aaron Carroll, another health policy wonk whose been deeply immersed in the policy wrangling over the ACA, offered a simple, effective answer to anyone looking to divine Congress’ intent from Gruber’s remarks:

Is there a single CBO analysis which documents what would happen if states refused to set up exchanges and would therefore “lose” their subsidies? Were any of Gruber’s models set up in this manner? If not, then I don’t understand how anyone in Congress or who set up the law thought it was going to work.

I accept that the law was written poorly. I accept that there may be individuals who thought it would work in the way the DC Circuit majority said. But there are tons of analyses, reports, interviews, and more that show that no one involved thought that way.

As for Gruber himself, that one 2012 comment stands in opposition to pretty much everything else he’s said about the argument over federal subsidies. Earlier this week on MSNBC he said “literally every single person involved in the crafting of this law has said that it’s a typo, that they had no intention of excluding the federal states. And why would they?” Asked by the New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn why he said what he did back in 2012, Gruber was stuck for an answer: “I honestly don’t remember why I said that. I was speaking off-the-cuff. It was just a mistake. People make mistakes. Congress made a mistake drafting the law and I made a mistake talking about it.”

So what does this all mean? I think Kevin Drum has the right take on Gruber’s follies. “The fact that he bollixed an audience question two years after the law’s passage doesn’t mean much. It’s a nice gotcha moment, but probably not much else.”

 

[Que]

The real winner under Obamacare is the insurance industry. I noticed you didn't respond to the thread I started on the GAO sting on Obamacare that proved how ridiculously easy it is to scam the government out of money under this fucked up system. The insurance industry executives who saw that must have laughed their asses off, realizing how much of the taxpayers' money they must be getting illegally.

Say you are some regional sales manager and you get bonuses on the number of signups...

You spend your spare times creating fake "customers" all of whom just happen to qualify for full subsidies, none of which will ever make a claim for healthcare.

The fraud on this will at some point make Mediscare fraud look like chump change.

You don't even have to commit the actual fraud yourself. Just pay $10-$15 per "sign-up" to your sales force and collect thousands of dollars a year per signup.


@Orfeo. NONE of the congressmen READ the bill much less WROTE it. The guy that DID help write it is on tape explaining the way the bill was designed to coerce States into giving up their sovereignty on the issue, same way it works with DOT money and Dept of Education money.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

Bah!

Gruber's no "architect."

http://mimg.ugo.com/201102/7/9/4/171497/cuts/architect_528x297.jpg

Now The Architect...HE was an architect!

http://media3.giphy.com/media/iMWHpJMdIhGCc/giphy.gif

 

[doubleover]

You'll have to forgive me if the things I get outraged about tend to be different from the things you get outraged about.
:nods:

The Devo hat looks better than the cowboy hat on John Wayne.

 

[Liar]

Supporters of the ACA say this is nonsense: the full text of the legislation makes clear that Congress intended to have the subsidies go to everyone, regardless of who was responsible for building the exchanges.

That's what I hear. Would be nice to get pointed in the direction of examples in the law that suggests (or makes unequivoaclly clear) that that is the case. I tried to Google for it but my computer got clogged with FUD. Took forever to flush it out.

 

[RobDownSouth]

“The fact that he bollixed an audience question two years after the law’s passage doesn’t mean much. It’s a nice gotcha moment, but probably not much else.”

Toubab's gonna be crushed.

 

[Que]

I love how it's a "bollixed' response to an audience members question and a minor typographical error in the law when it was DESIGNED to be an inducement to force the states to set up exchanges despite the overwhelming majorities in 36 states being opposed to the law.

Reminds me of Kagen talking about "boatloads of Federal money" as if the Federal money doesnt come ultimately from the citizens it "serves." Kagen was arguing (as if she still worked for Obama) that the three year front end loading of extra medicaid money makes up for an eternity of unfunded mandate thereafter.

I give the left credit. The administration sets up the talking points and they all dutifully march out and sing the chorus.

This wasn't and error, it was by design. OWN your party's bad design.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

You're being awfully judgmental towards their good "intentions."



And this is what this law will be decided on, the "intentions" of one party that everyone knows is true...



... everyone knows that accept for the racists.

 

[RobDownSouth]

That's right, query, the mythical monolithic "left" deliberately sabotaged their own signature piece of legislation.

You just keep sayin' that.

Maybe someone someday will agree with you.

 

[NeverEndingMe]

Toubab is always ready to sacrifice health care for the working poor in the name of his ideological purity.
:nods:

why doesn't your kind stand up and get a fucking job. then pay your fair share!
stop taking and demanding more hand outs