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Obama adviser Gruber admitted ObamaCare might not be affordable.


Posted: Dec 31, 2014

President Obama’s health care adviser Jonathan Gruber admitted that the Affordable Care Act might not be affordable while he was writing the bill with the White House.

As Gruber continues to withhold documents while he awaits a call-back for more testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in the new year, more information is coming to light detailing what went into the writing of the health-care law. (RELATED: Daily Caller Publishes First Video Of Gruber Calling The American People ‘Stupid’).

Gruber said that ObamaCare had no cost controls in it and might not be affordable in an October 2009 policy brief, presented here exclusively by TheDC. At the time, Gruber had already personally counseled Obama in the Oval Office and served on Obama’s presidential transition team. Obama, meanwhile, told the American people that their premiums would go down dramatically.

“The problem is it starts to go hand in hand with the mandate; you can’t mandate insurance that’s not affordable. This is going to be a major issue,” Gruber admitted in an October 2, 2009 lecture, the transcript of which made up the policy brief.

“So what’s different this time? Why are we closer than we’ve ever been before? Because there are no cost controls in these proposals. Because this bill’s about coverage. Which is good! Why should we hold 48 million uninsured people hostage to the fact that we don’t yet know how to control costs in a politically acceptable way? Let’s get the people covered and then let’s do cost control.”

Gruber also said that the only way to control costs is to effectively deny treatment.

“The real substance of cost control is all about a single thing: telling patients they can’t have something they want. It’s about telling patients, ‘That surgery doesn’t do any good, so if you want it you have to pay the full cost.’”

“There’s no reason the American health care system can’t be, ‘You can have whatever you want, you just have to pay for it.’ That’s what we do in other walks of life. We don’t say everyone has to have a large screen TV. If you want a large screen TV, you have to pay for it. Basically the notion would be to move to a level where everyone has a solid basic insurance level of coverage. Above that people pay on their own, without tax-subsidized dollars, to buy a higher level of coverage.”

And despite the president’s pitches to the contrary, Obama also knew that his health care bill was unlikely to control costs, Gruber said.

“I wish that President Obama could have stood up and said, ‘You know, I don’t know if this bill is going to control costs. It might, it might not. We’re doing our best. But let me tell you what it’s going to do…” Gruber said on a San Francisco podcast in 2012.

“If he could make that speech? Instead, he says ‘I’m going to pass a bill that will lower your health care costs.’ That sells. Now, I wish the world was different. I wish people cared about the 50 million uninsured in America…But, you know, they don’t. And I think, once again, I’m amazed politically that we got this bill through.”

;

Low income and other exemptions address mandate affordability - red ink alarm and

[ In Reply To ..]
if the ONLY way to effectively control costs, according to Mr. Gruber, is to deny treatment, then I for one am delighted to hear the act did not include those measures. Beyond that, I could care less how "amazed" Mr Gruber is. The bill passed and has been upheld by SCOTUS.

BTW, Stephen Zuckerman, Co-Director of Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center who has studied health care economics for 30 years, disagrees with Gruber, at least to the extent that he has written extensively on the subject of cost control provisions contained in the ACA.

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