Obamacare Architect Has Made Millions From The Americans He Thinks Are Stupid

Democrats were already feeling vulnerable about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with the Republicans winning control of both houses of Congress this month, but a series of videos that surfaced recently have made matters much worse. The videos depict key Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber disparaging the American people and publicizing what many are calling the deceptive strategies used to get the health care law passed.

Needless to say, the Obama administration is trying its best to distance itself from Gruber.

Take Nancy Pelosi—CSPAN discovered footage of her citing Gruber by name in 2009 regarding his analysis of the health care law. But the House Minority Leader stated plainly in a press conference earlier this month, “I don't know who that man is. He didn't help write our bill.” Bad news for Pelosi: even PolitiFact rated that one false.

President Obama has also tried to downplay Gruber's significance, dismissing him as “some adviser who never worked on our staff,” in a press conference during the G20 summit in Australia.

Technically the president's statement is true. Gruber was never an administration staff member, but he was intimately involved in crafting Obamacare. According to our records of government contracts from USASpending.gov, Gruber was awarded two contracts in 2009, where his role—according to the text of the first contract—was clear: to provide “technical assistance in evaluating options for national healthcare reform.”

The two contracts amounted to $390,000. A large sum, but a sum that only makes a small a dent in the total $5.86 million Gruber and his company have made from all the taxpayer-funded government contracts they've won.

Gruber's been awarded an additional eight contracts amounting to $1.94 million by the Department of State and the Department of Justice for ‘expert witness' and ‘legal services' since 2000. Those contracts weren't for Obamacare though. According to a report by Fox News, the DOJ hired Gruber to create incentives that would make tobacco companies stop marketing to teenage smokers, while the State Department hired him to “provide testimony in an NAFTA dispute with a Canadian tobacco firm.” See all of those contracts below.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health also awarded Gruber a contract for $2.05 million, and the states of Minnesota, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Michigan hired him for about $400,000 each to help launch their own ACA exchanges, according the National Review.

Despite the fact that much of Gruber's past work has not related to the Affordable Care Act—he's received about $2.06 million of his $5.86 contracting dollars for advising work directly related to Obamacare—conservatives all around the nation are calling for Gruber to return 100 percent of the “fraudulent” cash he earned from the very people he's called stupid many times over.

Among the comments causing the most backlash are those from Gruber's appearance on a panel at the Annual Health Economics Conference last year, where he was recorded calling American voters stupid and arguing that a lack of transparency in government is sometimes a good thing. If the Affordable Care Act had been openly discussed as a law that mandated the healthy to subsidize health care for the sick, he reasoned, it never would have passed.

“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? Just like how people—transparent—lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever. But basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

Nor, Gruber said, could the Obama administration have admitted the individual mandate penalty was a tax. “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO [Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If the CBO scores the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.”

Instead, the mandate penalty was called a fine and the overarching conversation surrounding Obamacare was framed around lowering healthcare costs rather than increasing coverage, “Barack Obama's not a stupid man, okay? He knew when he was running for president that, quite frankly, the American public doesn't actually care that much about the uninsured. . . . What the American public cares about is costs. And that's why even though the bill that they made is 90 percent health insurance coverage and 10 percent about cost control, all you ever hear people talk about is cost control,” Gruber said in the following 2010 CSPAN Clip.

Essentially, Gruber wanted Obamacare passed. He'd seen Romneycare succeed with flying colors in Massachusetts—enrolling 95 percent of the state's residents—and had an ends-justify-the-means mentality to getting the same thing done on a national level.

According to the New York Times' Neil Irwin, Gruber's approach isn't rare, “Here's the dirty little secret: Mr. Gruber was exposing something sordid yet completely commonplace about how Congress makes policy of all types: Legislators frequently game policy to fit the sometimes arbitrary conventions by which the Congressional Budget Office evaluates laws and the public debates them.”

At the Annual Health Economics Conference last year, even Gruber himself expressed, “I wish Mark was right and we could make it all transparent but I'd rather have this law than not.”

But despite being an embarrassing ordeal for the Obama Administration, will “Grubergate,” as many in the media have dubbed the incident, matter in the long run?

It's not clear yet. If it does, it'll be in the Supreme Court case King v. Burwell, where the plaintiff is arguing that the text of the ACA only allows for subsidies in states that have state-run exchanges. If the Supreme Court agrees, Obamacare would essentially be dismantled without being overturned.

Gruber's comments have bearing on the King v. Burwell case because they're the only statements by a person close to the Obama Administration that have ever come close to admitting that the ACA does in fact only allow subsidies for state-run exchanges. “What's important to remember politically about this,” Gruber said at conference in 2012, “is if you're a state and you don't set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits.”

That statement alone is not proof enough to win a Supreme Court case. Especially considering that nobody else in the Obama Administration has expressed (at least publicly) sentiments resembling Gruber's . At the very least, even if Grubergate doesn't dismantle Obamacare, this incident has certainly given the GOP's fight against the law a new vitality.

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