Another Gruber Video Shows Him Mocking Concerns About Obamacare
It’s been a rough week for MIT professor Jonathan Gruber.
The economist who assisted in the creation of the Affordable Care Act became fodder for national headlines after conservatives unearthed video of him suggesting the law only passed because of “lack of transparency” along with “the stupidity of the American voter.” He eventually called his past comments “inappropriate“; while the White House distanced itself from him, Nancy Pelosi claimed she didn’t know he existed, and well-known liberals like Howard Dean and Jay Carney outright bashed him.
Other videos have emerged of Gruber making similar remarks, but this latest one shows him mockingly dismissing someone’s concerns about the unintended consequences of Obamacare.
The 2011 footage, shot by TrueNorthReports.com, shows Gruber speaking before the Vermont House Health Care Committee about what soon became the state’s single-payer system, known as Green Mountain Care. At the time, Gruber was present to discuss the points laid out in the so-called “Hsiao Report,” co-written by him and fellow economist William C. Hsiao.
When State Rep. Mark Larson (D-Burlington) read off a Vermonter’s concerns that the health care law would result in “ballooning costs, increased taxes, bureaucratic outrages, shabby facilities, disgruntled providers, long waiting times, lower quality care, special interest nest-feathering, and destructive wages and price controls.”
Amid the crowd’s laughter, Gruber joked: “Was this written by my adolescent children by any chance?”
As it turns out, those comments came from John McClaughry, a former Vermont state senator who advised Ronald Reagan in the ’80s. “It was actually written by a former senior policy adviser in the White House who knew something about health care systems,” he responded to Gruber, via Watchdog News, a right-leaning state-based journalism project of the Franklin Center.
Watch the video below:
