And they did it by lying. They knowing lied. They weren't mistaken about some point of fact, they lied:
MIT Economist Dr. Jonathan Gruber, widely cited as “the architect of ObamaCare,” recently committed a Kinsley gaffe, “when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say..."They lied, and it's not even working as planned. Forget the horrible roll-out, they aren't getting the sign-ups:
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. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you 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. It’s a second-best argument. Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not....Apparently Dr. Gruber thinks it’s OK to lie to American voters when his allies are in power to enact policies that he wants but the voters wouldn’t. He then says American voters are “stupid” both for not agreeing with his value choices and for not figuring out the deception.
Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Monday projected that up to 9.9 million people would be enrolled in ObamaCare in 2015, millions fewer than Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates.How many of these are people who lost their insurance because of Obamacare? How many are paying more now than they would for the health insurance they lost?
Federal health officials are projecting that ObamaCare enrollment will include at least 3.1 million fewer people next year than congressional budget analysts thought.
HHS, which previously declined to project 2015 sign-ups, said that between 9 million and 9.9 million people are expected to participate in the exchanges in 2015.
The figure was less than the CBO’s projection of 13 million for 2015 enrollment, raising questions about the exchanges' performance, compared with expectations.
Socialism. It would be a hilarious joke if it weren't so real.
6 comments:
I've been saying all along … there is absolutely no way that the ACA can sustain itself, just based on the few policies out of the … 1200? pages of legislation that no one has read … that I know about. To hear an MIT econ professor essentially acknowledge that makes me feel good; to hear him say they deliberately misled the American public because they were stupid -- yeah, that sounds about right. But, they wised up quickly, when they started seeing the effects first hand, didn't they?
Some of us questioned the bill. We doubted the numbers given to the CBO. Many of us protested at government offices, at public events only to be ridiculed and labeled as stupid or worse-racist. We deserved answers then and we deserve them now. If this was passed-and I use the term loosely since it was a procedural instead of a true up or down vote-using false data and deliberately misleading projections, we should repeal it and start over. From the start I felt this was not about healthcare, but about creating a system to siphon money from the middle class to those voters who could be led en masse to produce a government based on acclamation over vote.
When you've driven off a cliff, it doesn't really matter how quickly you wise up to that fact.
I never had a moment's doubt that Obamacare was based on any number of false premises but it's nice to get vindication so early in the game. Usually you have to wait until whatever policy's being discussed is in a state of collapse before the lies necessary to secure passage start to bob to the surface.
Of course Obamacare could well be in a state of collapse with the administration frantically trying to keep that information from the public. But if it isn't already failing then it won't be long before it does.
The principle matters if you were driven off a cliff, while the driver assured you there was a bridge … totally agree with Ellen K … we repeal and reinvent --but…the Republicans need to have a good proposal ready when they do, and that has yet to happen. Spot fixes will not work on this.
Now we're holding onto one last hope. The Supreme Court took a case challenging subsidies for policies brought thorough the federal exchange, where the act only allows it through state established exchanges. Hopefully John Roberts will do the right thing this time and call this crap what it is, unconstitutional.
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