Sen. Chuck Schumer’s admission that passing Obamacare was a mistake.
Jonathan Gruber and the Truth About Obamacare
In a 2009 interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, President Obama emphatically rejected the notion that the individual mandate is a tax. He was adamant that it was a penalty and not a tax, reasoning that because people without health insurance sometimes end up in the emergency room, causing costs to rise for the rest of us, the individual mandate penalty was not a tax.
Then in 2012, White House attorneys argued before the Supreme Court that it was indeed tax, and repeatedly called it that before the Court, which in its ruling found that the only way the mandate could pass constitutional muster was if it is construed as a tax, not a penalty. In what is by now Gruber’s most famous video, he explains that the bill was “written in a tortured way to ensure that CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes the bill dies.” Clearly, he considers the mandate a tax, albeit one cleverly written not to be scored as such by the Congressional Budget Office, but a tax nonetheless.
This is a pattern. In one of the Gruber videos, he admitted that the purpose of the “Cadillac tax” on certain employer-sponsored health plans is to discourage employers from providing health insurance. The ultimate goal, Gruber explained, is to get rid of the tax subsidy for employer health plans altogether, albeit indirectly, 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.” At a town hall meeting in 2009, the president specifically said this was not the purpose of the Cadillac tax and that it had been “taken off the table.”
In terms of understanding Gruber’s unexpected honesty about his deceit, it could be that four years is just the distance necessary for people in politics to admit their failings. That seems to be the rationale for Sen. Chuck Schumer’s admission that passing Obamacare was a mistake.
https://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2014/11/25/jonathan-gruber-and-truth-about-obamacare
