The missing dimension in the whole
Jonathan Gruber scandal is this: however the law got made, it worked. Millions of people—
more than 15 million—have health insurance, many of whom did not have coverage before the law. Seniors have
saved hundreds of millions of dollars on prescription drugs. Medicare spending
has fallen dramatically, saving the federal government billions.
That should be the premise under which every story, every "scandal," about the law is written. That includes the story of Jonathan Gruber, the analyst and consultant to the White House while the law was being written who has said some pretty inflammatory and incorrect things about the law. Here's what else to keep in mind. While Gruber has done quite well on the lecture service, billing himself as the "architect" of the law, he wasn't.
[W]hile conservatives are all but labeling him the giver of Obamacare in their effort to wring political points out of his statements, Gruber wasn’t the first to suggest such central components as the law's exchanges, mandates, insurance subsidies and Medicaid expansion.
And, the law's proponents point out, he was more of a scorekeeper than an actual creator of the law.
"Was he in the administration, was he in the Congress, did he draft provisions of the law?" said Chris Jennings, a health care consultant and former White House aide on health policy. "The answer to all those questions is no, so just by definition he was not the architect of the law. He wasn't a member [of Congress], he wasn't an elected leader, he wasn't [a] staff member to those members, he was not a political or career appointee to the administration. He was a private consultant."
Here's something else to keep in mind: the process of lawmaking Gruber was complaining about in that rant, that the bill "was written in a tortured way to make sure" the Congressional Budget Office "did not score the mandate as taxes." Republicans have seized on that to pretend that Democrats were keeping huge parts of the law secret. Well, guess who else
used a tortured process to pass a law?
President George W. Bush’s expansion of Medicare in 2003 was carefully designed so that its costs were backloaded, rising sharply just after its 10-year mark. Estimating costs in the 10-year window is an (arbitrary) convention for C.B.O. scoring of pending legislation. The design of the law made it seem less costly than it was expected to be over a longer time period.
Does this make a scandal? No way. What's a scandal is that Republicans want to take access to health care away from millions of people. That's, to quote Vice President Biden, "literally" a "big fucking deal." It's life and death for plenty of Americans.