Politics
President Crafted Obamacare Deception With Gruber At White House Meeting
10:37 AM 11/14/2014
Patrick Howley
MIT professor Gruber, who served as a top Obama administration consultant during the writing of Obamacare, garnered national condemnation this week after The Daily Caller published a video in which he credited a lack of transparency for Obamacare’s passage. Gruber said the law survived an existential threat posed by “the stupidity of the American voter.”
Gruber had a powerful partner in his effort to spin or conceal politically vulnerable aspects of Obamacare from the public: the president of the United States.
The Gateway Pundit highlighted a clip from Gruber’s 2012 interview with the PBS program Frontline in which the professor admitted that he worked together with the president in the Oval Office to conceal the political impact of their plan to get more tax revenue out of employer-sponsored health insurance plans by imposing a new “Cadillac tax” on companies. The Gateway Pundit also confirmed that Gruber checked into the West Wing for a meeting with the president on July 20, 2009, according to White House visitor logs.
“Now, the problem is, it’s a political nightmare … and people say, ‘No, you can’t tax my benefits.’ So what we did a lot in that room was talk about, well, how could we make this work?” Gruber said.
“And Obama was like, ‘Well, you know’ — I mean, he is really a realistic guy. He is like, ‘Look, I can’t just do this.’ He said: ‘It is just not going to happen politically. The bill will not pass. How do we manage to get there through phases and other things?’ And we talked about it. And he was just very interested in that topic,” Gruber continued.
“Once again, that ultimately became the genesis of what is called the Cadillac tax in the health-care bill, which I think is one of the most important and bravest parts of the health care law and doesn’t get nearly enough credit,” Gruber added.
The White House stated its disagreement with Gruber’s remarks Thursday, but its attempt to distance itself from Gruber should prove futile. Gruber attended five of the 12 White House meetings with top experts to design Obamacare in 2009, according to a 2011 transcript of an MSNBC program that Gruber appeared on. Gruber was present at the Oval Office planning meeting that Obama attended on July 20, 2009. Gruber’s “objective analysis” showing that Obamacare would lower premiums was featured on the White House blog in November 2009.
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