By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Do I really think it is worth discussing the possibility that Jonathan Gruber is “stupid”? No, of course not. I have no doubt that his IQ is off the charts and that he can maneuver his way around complicated economic theories with the best of them. “Lacking the political savvy” would be the more accurate term to describe him. He failed to understand how the video clips of him calling the American people “stupid” would come back to haunt him.
You can almost feel sorry for the guy. His comments were made at conferences where he was using shorthand references to make his point to a group he was convinced did not require a detailed analysis of what he meant. He was trying to come across as clever, and a political insider. If he were given a chance to reword what he said, he would come up with something to the effect that most Americans are “uninformed” about public policy involving the economic concepts he was discussing, including large numbers of highly intelligent Americans who do not follow politics closely because of the demands of their careers.
The conservative critics and Fox News commentators who are raking him over the coals know this. Gruber might be an elitist of the worst sort, but these clips of him making the rounds do not prove that. All they illustrate is his naiveté about the power of the iPhone to make public things that we used to assume were private. I have been at conferences and seminars where conservative Republicans routinely refer to liberal Democrats and columnists, such as New York Times editorial writer Paul Krugman, as “gullible,” “dupes,” “true-believers,” and “economic illiterates” who think there will never be a day or reckoning for our growing national debt.
If you can get these conservatives in a corner, they will admit that these labels do not fit all liberal Democrats; that, whatever you think of the liberals on the staffs of Ivy League universities, they are not “economic illiterates.” It can be argued that they are wrong in their belief in the power of command economies to create posterity, but not that they lack knowledge about economic theory.
Does this mean that I support what Gruber said? No; emphatically no. My point is only that he should be criticized for his cooperation with the Obama administration in its effort to mislead the American people over Obamacare, not for his use of the word “stupid.” We should not forget that it is possible to carry out a con job on people who are intelligent and highly educated. No doubt there were people in the media and the academy and public at large who were aware of, and participated in, the flimflam employed to sell Obamacare, but, from what I can tell, most of those who supported the president’s health-care initiative were genuinely convinced that it would provide universal health insurance and lower health-care costs, without raising taxes. They bought into these promises by the Obama administration not because they were “stupid,” but because they believe in the power of government to make our lives better.
For example, people who do not spend their days immersed in economic theory and public policy are not likely to question the implications of Obamacare’s requirement that insurance companies provide coverage regardless of “pre-existing conditions.” They will not see the connection between this requirement and the need for a “universal mandate.” Beyond that, it will not hit them in the face that if the government is going to provide “tax credits” to help people forced to buy insurance because of the universal mandate, taxes will have to go up on a significant number of Americans.
Gruber deserves to be criticized for maneuvering for a way to keep this reality from the people, not for his low estimate of their intelligence. Judging from the comments I have heard in diners and bars, some highly educated people were fooled by the smokescreen that Gruber helped the administration employ. As Gruber was heard saying in the tapes, if people knew they were going to be taxed to provide coverage for the uninsured, both he and Obama knew that Obamacare was “dead.” The goal was to disguise this reality.
A similar deception was employed to fool people about Obamacare’s proposed tax on “Cadillac health-care plans.” Gruber realized that this tax on generous health-care plans — such as the plans many union members receive — would be acceptable to the voters only if it could be made to appear as if the tax was on the insurance companies, not on working Americans. Gruber was confident that most people would not realize that the insurance companies would pass on the tax to their insured in the form of higher premiums.
As he stated in a 2012 speech at the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research in Boston, “Economists have called for 40 years to get rid of the regressive, inefficient, and expensive tax subsidy provided for employer provider health insurance.” The subsidy is “terrible policy, but it turns out politically it’s really hard to get rid of. And the only way we could get rid of it was first 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.” Is that a lie? At the very least, it is an attempt to mislead.
The biggest deception of all is the denial that Obamacare was designed as a stepping stone toward socialized medicine or a single-payer system such as that in place in Canada. Obama stated specifically at a conference in 2007 that it was his hope to move toward a single-payer system: “I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision it a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out.” Obamacare is that transition process. But Obama knows he can’t say that for fear of alienating the voters.
Jonathan Gruber agrees. In an interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC in March of 2012, he stated flatly, “I think that single payer has a lot to recommend it, but we believed it is too radical a proposal for the moment,” because the $2 billion private insurance industry is not going to go “quietly into the night.” Obamacare is designed to hold us over until the time comes when a single-payer system becomes a politically viable proposal to put before the voters.
But Gruber knows he can’t say that in public. At least not in a venue where anyone has an iPhone. As he stated in 2012 to Noblis, a Virginia think tank, “Remember, the reason this reform passed, as barely as it did, is because it was not trying to rip up things and start over. It was trying to work incrementally off the existing system. The public option was viewed as too radical.”
It is not that Canada’s single-payer system, or the European socialized medical system, is self-evidently a bad choice. That can be debated. What is offensive is the leaders of our government pushing for it, while pretending not to. Obama and Gruber did that.
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