ObamaCare consultant walks back comments about 'stupidity of American voter'
Jonathan Gruber, the MIT professor who served as a consultant to the Obama administration while ObamaCare was taking shape, caused a stir after comments he made during a 2013 panel in which he said that the healthcare law's lack of transparency is a "huge political advantage" recently surfaced online.
"Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass... Look, I wish... we could make it all transparent, but I'd rather have this law than not," Gruber said.
ObamaCare's individual mandate was upheld by the Supreme Court because it was a tax, but Gruber admits in the video that it's not actually a tax: "The bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it's written to do that."
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Now that Gruber's remarks have gone viral on the right, Gruber went on MSNBC to apologize and walk back his remarks. ObamaCare needed to be opaque in order to pass, he said, and his argument was more nuanced than it appeared.
"The comments in the video were made at an academic conference," Gruber told host Ronan Farrow. "I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately and I regret having made those comments."
