So-called Obamacare “architect” Jonathan Gruber appears on a second video claiming that the healthcare law passed Congress in part because the American public was too stupid to understand it.
The follow-up footage was shown last night on Megyn Kelly’s show The Kelly File .
According to The Daily Caller , the second video “appears to be from a lecture Gruber gave at Washington University in St. Louis in October of last year” in which Gruber again seemed to talking about how complicated legalese hid Obamacare tax increases from the public.
The White House reportedly paid the MIT professor $400,000 to help write Obamacare, a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act.
In the first video which ran wild across the internet, Gruber claimed at a 2013 academic conference at the University of Pennsylvania that the lack of transparency along with “the stupidity of the American voter” enabled the law to pass.
In a 2013 Google Plus hangout, President Obama deemed his administration the most transparent in history.
As you may recall, then-candidate Obama suggested that healthcare reform negotiations could be televised on C-SPAN. After a lot of behind-the-scenes arm twisting (which included such incentives as the “ cornhusker kickback ” and the “Louisiana purchase” ), however, Obamacare passed the U.S. Senate on Christmas Eve 2009, and the U.S. House on March 21, 2010, on a straight party line vote when both chambers were controlled by Democrats.
Public dissatisfaction with Obamacare partially explained the Republican landslide last Tuesday that conveyed control of the Senate to the GOP and increased its hold on the House.
About the first Gruber video, The Washington Post observed that “Those comments have struck a nerve on the right, with some of the law’s critics pointing to Gruber’s comments as evidence that the administration intentionally deceived the American public on the costs of the program.”
After that video surfaced, and the subsequent firestorm, Gruber went on MSNBC and said “The comments in the video were made at an academic conference. I was speaking off the cuff, and I basically spoke inappropriately, and I regret having made those comments.”
Reacting to Gruber’s initial comments about the alleged stupidity of American voters, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a medical doctor who was a 2004 Democrat presidential candidate, declared that “the problem is not that he said it. The problem is that he thinks it. The core problem under the damn law is it was put together by a bunch of elitists who don’t fundamentally understand the American people. That’s what the problem is.”
The White House has yet to issue a statement about Jonathan Gruber’s Obamacare comments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zyco9bHR0jU
About Gruber, Ron Fournier of the National Journal insisted that “He called you stupid. He admitted that the White House lied to you. Its officials lied to all of us–Republicans, Democrats, and independents; rich and poor; white and brown; men and women. Liberals should be the angriest. Not only were they personally deceived, but the administration’s dishonest approach to health care reform has helped make Obamacare unpopular while undermining the public’s faith in an activist government. A double blow to progressives.”
Footage of the controversial Jonathan Gruber Obamacare remarks was unearthed by previously obscure investment advisor Rich Weinstein, one of millions of Americans who lost his existing healthcare coverage which was replaced by Obamacare insurance that “cost twice as much,” Bloomberg Politics reported.