At
New Republic, Jon Cohn has a detailed exploration on the whole
Jonathan Gruber Obamacare mess and what Gruber's comments tell us about American politics. It's worth a read if you want to delve back into the painful intricacies of the debate and slow forward motion of the legislation we were all glued to for so many months. It's his conclusion, though,
that's worth focusing on.
Gruber’s comments about the "stupidity" of the American voters were wrong and inappropriate because voters aren't dumb. And while the average person on the street may not grasp the tradeoffs or intricacies of policy—or even recognize that "Obamacare" and the "Affordable Care Act" are one and the same—the public is supposed to have the help of analysts and journalists to translate and search for the truth. Gruber is an independent-minded professor who excels at explaining things simply and colorfully, making him both an ideal person for that job and easy mark in the era of YouTube journalism. He's also a public figure, although not a politician, and personally accountable for what he says.
But the broader critiques that Gruber’s comments have fueled really don't make sense. In crafting and then promoting the Affordable Care Act, the Obama Administration was, if anything, more transparent and more open about policy than both its predecessors and its opponents. It was certainly more responsible about managing the federal budget. Ironically, one small reason for that candor and fiscal rectitude is the analysis Gruber provided, privately and publicly, as he was trying to help pass a law that—oh, by the way—would provide economic security and probably better health to millions of Americans.
In a non-politicized world, Gruber's comments would not have been seized upon with such glee and hammered so hard by Republicans. Comments from outside experts—and while he did receive a contract for modeling the economics of various proposals for the bill, he was not involved in the actual writing of the legislation—are a commonplace feature in public policy. Rarely, though, do they become such a critical tool for the opposition. There's every possibility that the Gruber controversy will be flogged to the point that the U.S. Supreme Court
will find justification for striking down a key component of the law.
That's not on Gruber, though. That's on the whole political journalist/pundit realm that has missed the actual public policy behind the law because the political game of it has been so hard to resist. Yes, this law can and does provide economic security and better health to millions. It's done so without busting the budget. It's done so without causing sky-high premiums for customers. It's done so by harming very, very few people, just those who'd rather pay very little for bare-bones insurance. The only large swath of people hurt in all of this—the millions in the Medicaid gap in states that haven't expanded the program—haven't been hurt by the law itself, but by the Supreme Court which decided that health care could be withheld from them.
This can no longer be about how the law was passed, though that's going to be the sole focus of Republicans as they continue to push to destroy it. It's got to be about what happens to the millions of people who have benefitted from it if it all goes away.