Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Jonathan Holmes Gruber, the One-Time Self-Professed Architect of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), Who Is Also a Tenured Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Argues With Fox News Channel Political Analyst and Correspondent Tucker Carlson Over What He Describes as 'an Attempt by Opponents of the Law to Somehow Delegitimize the Efficacy of Its Mandate"


Born on September 30th of 1965, Jonathan Holmes Gruber, is a tenured professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a position he has held since 1992. He is also acknowledged as the director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is also employed as a research associate, as well as the associate editor of two separate peer-reviewed academic journals - both the Journal of Public Economics and the Journal of Health Economics.


Recall that Gruber made mention of an unspoken reliance on the ‘stupidity of the American voter’ to guarantee its passage, a fact that he now disputes on the basis of the quote’s inaccuracy, choosing instead to cite that his statements were ‘taken out of context.’ 

On January 25th of 2017, during the course of a live syndicated television broadcast, Gruber was confronted on several key issues pertaining to the aforementioned piece of legislation - primarily its impacts on the economy, as well as its effects on the middle class, both of which he would later claim to be negligible. The brief 9 minute and 13 second video below, which aired on the Fox News Channel's Tucker Carlson Tonight program details the contents of this verbal exchange:


Several points need to be reiterated, specifically the context of several utterances made in the interview by Gruber, all of which are detailed in the following:

“Well I -uh - I mean the polls have moved a lot Tucker, we don't really know where the public is at this point, it's in flux. I, I-I, think they feel that way because there’s been a lot of misinformation about what the law has done, here's a simple example Tucker: ‘Everyone agrees that Obamacare has increased insurance coverage in America, but if you ask Americans what Obamacare’s done to insurance coverage, almost as many claim that its decline has gone up, I think that's a prime example of the misinformation that’s been spread, I think Americans just don't understand what this law's done for them."

~ Proclamation made in response to Carlson's contentions that a strong majority of Americans, an estimated 60 percent, want to see the PPACA repealed entirely or in part

“People who oppose the law are people who haven't benefited from the law, but haven't been hurt from the law, they’ve just heard - in-in my view - they’ve just heard a lot of bad misinformation about it.”

~ Claim made in response to an earlier statement disputing the PPACA’s scope of approval in the public arena

“This law was never supposed to help everybody Tucker, that wasn't the design, the law was actually explicitly designed first in Massachusetts, and then for the nation, to leave the vast majority of Americans alone. People that had health insurance that worked for them through their employer, the government, were not designed to be affected by this law by in large in the near term; they were hoped to benefit in the long term through lowering costs, but in the near term the law was designed to fix what was wrong with our system, which was focused on the 20 percent of Americans who did not have health insurance or were buying it through a broken non-group insurance system. That was the design of the law.”

~ Iteration made in response to Carlson's suggestion that passage of the law was intended to benefit all Americans


“Who’s been hurt by Obamacare is two groups: 'One is the wealthiest Americans, -uh, the top 2% of Americans that had to pay new taxes (notice how Gruber acknowledges in this quote that the bill is, in fact, an additional tax levied on consumers by the Federal Government pursuant to the edicts ratification; a contention that was steadfastly denied by both the mainstream media, as well as the proponents of the legislative mandate in question), and second is, the very healthy individuals who benefited from a previously discriminatory insurance market. So before insurers could kick sick people out - well, that's bad for sick people, but good for healthy people - so if you're a young healthy person in the market you benefited from the fact that sick people were excluded. Obamacare said, 'no,' insurers have to behave fairly, insure everyone, that meant that for some young, healthy people their premiums went up.’”

~ Statement made in response to a question posed by Carlson regarding the affordability of the 2010 health care provision 


“Tucker that's a trivial part of the issue, the reason healthy people are paying more is not the extra services, it's that they're being asked to fairly be in a pool with healthy and sick people. The extra services are a trivial distraction from the problem. That's not what drives the costs.”

~ Utterance made following Carlson's contention that everyday Americans are justified in their grievances of having to assume the fiscal burden of having to pay for services outlined within the context of the PPACA which they themselves would never have need of

CONCLUSION: Anyone who views this particular exchange, and then glances over the context of Gruber’s equivocations regarding the substantive benefits of a legislative measure whose enactment was based largely on the ignorance of the general public, should reach a similar conclusion with regard to the political establishment’s overt display of contempt for the proletariat.

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