Given the consequences of Obamacare, many Americans have been wondering why any president would implement a healthcare law that would boost the price of insurance plans. Some believed that the price hikes were merely an unforeseen side effect, a terrible mistake made by a careless administration with a lofty view of itself.
Now the American people know that the mistake isn’t a mistake at all. Rather, the consequence of higher prices for health insurance was the intention all along. A new editorial in the Las Vegas Review Journal explains that the administration that believes itself to be a cut above the intelligence of the average American and therefore untouchable intentionally sought to raise the prices of insurance plans.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and Affordable Care Act architect Jonathan Gruber was caught on video admitting that President Obama’s “health insurance overhaul were designed to hide the legislation’s true cost to Americans.” Gruber explained to an audience at the University of Pennsylvania that “the American people were simply too dumb to understand the importance of the legislation.”
Gruber’s opinion of the American people “relates to the deceptive passage of the so-called “Cadillac” tax”—a tax the MIT professor devised. Of course, the Cadillac tax “will aggressively tax the plans of a growing number of Americans in the years ahead.”
Gruber reveals the Obama administration’s true intentions when, in another video, he “explains that his real goal was to reduce the tax breaks available to the roughly 170 million Americans who receive employer-sponsored health insurance.” Due to the fact that it would be impossible to “persuade Congress to reduce the tax breaks that help make insurance more affordable,” Gruber decided an excise tax to be the best course of action. Gruber said,
“We just tax the insurance companies, they pass on higher prices that offsets the tax break we get, it ends up being the same thing… It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.”
Gruber said it yet another video that Obamacare also removes the tax preference for employee-sponsored insurance “by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we all know it’s a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.”
Finally, Gruber—perhaps worst of all—admits that the so-called Cadillac tax will eventually apply to “more and more health insurance plans, affecting an increasing number of Americans who don’t have top-flight benefits.” In other words, “if Obamacare hasn’t hurt your wallet yet, it soon will.”
The Las Vegas Review Journal reminds readers,
It’s worth noting that many economists — and most Republicans — spent 2009 warning that the Affordable Care Act was a ruse, that it would increase health insurance costs for most Americans, not cut them. They warned that Obamacare, far from allowing Americans to keep their existing plans and doctors, would wipe out the policies of millions of Americans and force them to find new providers. They warned that Obamacare was a massive transfer of wealth from the young and healthy to the old and sick.
Republicans no longer have to make the argument that Obamacare must, at a minimum, be dialed back, and preferably repealed outright. Mr. Gruber has done it for them.
