Within minutes of condemning a key Obamacare architect’s remarks belittling American voters, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell twice refused to say whether the paid White House consultant will continue his role advising the administration on health-care policy.
Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Burwell was asked about Obamacare adviser Jonathan Gruber’s ridiculing “stupid” American voters for falling for White House propaganda about the national health-care law.
Last week, tapes surfaced that Gruber had said he and his Democratic colleagues had hid the health law’s true costs from the public to take advantage of the “stupidity of the American voter” and pass the bill. In another speech, Gruber said “Americans were too stupid to understand” Obamacare’s main tax hike. In yet another, he boasted of Obamacare’s “exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.”
“I have to start with how fundamentally I disagree with his comments about the bill and about the American people,” Burwell said in an interview with “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd.
Todd then asked if Gruber would remain an Obamacare adviser but could not get a straight answer.
Todd: “Is Mr. Gruber going to be be welcomed back as a consultant?”
Burwell: “Um, certainly right now in terms of the work we’re doing at HHS we’re doing our work and focusing on what we are doing and our modeling.”
Todd: “So he’s not welcome back.”
Burwell: “Ah, with regard to Mr. Gruber and his comments, I think I’ve been clear — that’s something we fundamentally disagree with.”
Todd: “Madame Secretary, thanks for coming on ‘Meet the Press.'”
Todd did not press further.
The Obama administration hired Gruber in 2009 as a consultant earning at least $400,000 for “technical support” and “analysis” of the Affordable Care Act. Health-care officials had more than a dozen meetings in the White House with Gruber, including at least one attended by President Obama. The White House dedicated an entire page of the Obamacare website to his analysis.
“If they hadn’t had this kind of analysis, well, the law would not be designed as well,” Gruber has said.
Speaking at an October 2013 event at Washington University in St. Louis, he referred to the so-called “Cadillac tax” on high-end health plans.
“They proposed it and that passed,” he said, “because the American people are too stupid to understand the difference.”
He made similar remarks at a separate event around the same time in 2013.
In a clip of that event, Gruber said: “If you had a law which said healthy people are going to pay in — if you made it explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed, OK?”
The “lack of transparency” in the way the law was crafted was “critical.”
“Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass,” he explained.
It’s not the only time Gruber called the American public stupid.
Again in 2013, he said he and administration officials played with the language of Obamacare taxes to fool the public.
“Well that’s pretty much the same thing, why’s it matter? You’ll see. And they were both in and that passed, because the American voter is too stupid to understand the difference,” Gruber said.
In 2012, moreover, Gruber told an audience at the University of Rhode Island that he and administration officials were cleverly exploiting the American public.
“We just tax the insurance companies, they pass on the higher prices, that offsets the tax break we get, it ends up being the same thing,” Gruber said. “So (it’s) a very clever, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.”
After the first tape surfaced, Gruber went on MSNBC to express regret, saying: “I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately, and I regret having made those comments.”
