Monday, November 10, 2014

Stupid is as stupid does

One of the more infamous quotes that emerged during the crafting of Obamacare came from then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in early 2010.

"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."

San Fran Nan's gaffe may now be overshadowed by revelations of brutal honesty conveyed by Jonathan Gruber, the Affordable Care Act's architect, a little more than a year ago.

“Mark [Pauly] made a couple of comments that I do want to take issue with, one about transparency in financing and the other is about moving from community rating to risk-rated subsidies. You can’t do it politically. You just literally cannot do it, okay, transparent financing…and also transparent spending.” Gruber said. “In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in—you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed, okay. 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…Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”

The ol' "end justifies the means" rationale.

Notice the overarching theme, which is these intellectuals know what's better for you than you do, thus you can't be trusted to make the right decision. But lest we forget, voters were burning up the phone lines to Capitol Hill 4-1/2 years ago in an effort to persuade their senators and representatives from supporting this legislation. Heck, the state of Massachusetts even voted in a Republican in January 2010 to fill the Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy (a top visionary for healthcare reform) an effort to throw up a proverbial roadblock.

Mr. Gruber can cite the voters as being "stupid" all he wants, but those who were most duped appear to have been the leftist water carriers in the Mainstream Media as well as the Congressional Budget Office.

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