Stupidity, Lies, and Videotape

Gruber crystalized his jaded views during a panel discussion at the Annual Health Economics Conference at the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics on October 17, 2013 Gruber said,

“This 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… In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass.”

via Stupidity, Lies, and Videotape.