Charles Krauthammer wrote an editorial describing how recently released videos of MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, an architect of Obamacare, describing how Obamacare was written deceptively to allow it to become law. Gruber explained, “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. Basically call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass. Gruber also explained that the authors of the bill realized they had to manipulate the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that is responsible for issuing cost estimates on any legislative proposal. “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CDO did not score the mandate as taxes. If the CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” The President even insisted in his speeches in favor of the law that what must be paid to the government if you fail to buy health insurance was not a tax. We all know that the Supreme Court declared the law constitutional because it was a tax.

There were numerous broken promises. One that was repeated on numerous occasions by the President was that “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Period. If you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance. Period. Then people learned their doctors often weren’t included in the government-approved coverage. People who had shopped for tailored health insurance were told they could not keep their insurance because it was substandard. Thus a fifty year old woman with no children remaining at home was told her insurance did not meet government standards because it did not include maternity benefits or pediatric dental coverage.

Another promise that astonished me from the start was that 30 million uninsured could obtain health insurance and it wouldn’t cost anything. It was instead promised that the “typical family” would save $2500 in insurance premiums. There have been numerous reports that people who signed up for the “Bronze” (least expensive) plan are finding that they have insurance benefits only after they have paid a deductible of several thousand dollars.

Back to Mr. Gruber on how the law would be funded. He admitted it would be a huge transfer of wealth that that to be hidden from the American people. He explained, “…if you had a law which…made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.”

My wife was quite angry after listening to Mr. Gruber’s videotaped comments. I, being quite clever, asked why she was so upset. She said it was mostly about Gruber’s comments about the “…stupidity of the American voter…” Gruber and the politicians did not fool the American people. Polls before and since the passage of the law found a substantial majority of citizens did not and do not support the law. The only people who were sufficiently stupid, in Mr. Gruber’s terminology, to believe what had been written, were the Democrat Representatives and Senators who voted to pass the bill. It’s no surprise that average Americans understand a scam when they see it but large numbers of politicians can be fooled by high-paid consultants such as Mr. Gruber.