Video of MIT Economist and Affordable Care Act architect Jonathan Gruber is making headlines with apparently damning evidence that the Obama admin intended to fool the American public into accepting a new "tax" to pay for treating the sick and insuring those who cannot afford premiums.
Gruber on Obamacare
A couple of points I'd make in response. First, I think that even before its passage in Congress, most of us did realize that the only way for the plan to work is for the more affluent to pay more for coverage, and for the healthy and young to sign up for plans, bringing more money into the system to buffer for the older, sick and uninured. There was fooling going on, but it primarily came from the right, where claims of death panels, reduced access to care and loss of policies on a massive scale were so common.
Second, given that the economists at the CBO were key in determining whether or not the law entailed a new tax, we can't really assume this assessment was made due to "stupidity." And while it may be the case that Gruber is an academic who holds no respect for the intelligence of the general public, it's also possible that his discussion of this framework in a public forum was meant to educate an intelligent public about the structure of Obamacare following its implementation. In a media stream where the estate tax on the affluent was long ago transformed into a death tax on family farmers, controlling the narrative does become a shell game. But now that Obamacare is in place, and working well in the states that took steps to implement it, there's nothing wrong with emphasizing its redistributive nature. Ultimately this topic could set the stage for more public discussion/acceptance of a progressive tax structure a la the Eisenhower era... But negative sound bites such as Gruber's do make this more of a challenge.