A new poll shows 32% of Americans agree with MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, who says voters are just too stupid to understand Obamacare and had to be misled about it in order to secure its passage. But a majority of Americans–52%–disagree.
Gruber, widely acknowledged as the architect of Obamacare, has appeared in at least six videos in which he bragged about deceiving the American people on the details of Obamacare.
On November 7, American Commitment published a YouTube video in which Gruber said, “Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically, that [deception] was really really critical to get the thing [Obamacare] to pass.”
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” Gruber said on the video. “If you had a law which said healthy people are going to pay in… you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people are going to get money, it would not have passed,” he added.
“Lack of transparency,” Gruber concluded, “is a huge political advantage.”
That video was filmed at a 2013 conference at the University of Pennsylvania.
Another five videos, shot between 2009 and 2014, have subsequently been unearthed, all of which show Gruber making similar assertions. In the sixth and most recent video to surface, Gruber said in a 2011 speech to the Pioneer Institute the only way the “Cadillac tax” included in Obamacare could pass was by “mislabeling” it (his comments begin at the 30:34 mark in the video).
The Gruber videos serve to re-enforce what conservatives have been saying since before the bill was passed in March of 2010: it’s a scheme to redistribute income under the guise of healthcare reform and only passed because its supporters lied to the American people about its key components.
Surprisingly, supporters of Obamacare were less likely to think Americans were too stupid to understand the law than opponents. “Among voters who favor the health care law, only 18% think Americans are too stupid to understand the actual costs associated with the law. Those who oppose the law, however, by a 46% to 42% margin do think the American people are that stupid,” according to the poll analysis released by Rasmussen Reports.
The poll of 1,000 likely voters “was conducted on November 12-13, 2014.” It has a 3 percentage points margin of error.
Breaking down the poll results by party affiliation, “Sixty-two percent (62%) of Democrats and voters not affiliated with either major party by a 47% to 33% margin say the American people are not too stupid to understand the actual costs associated with Obamacare. Republicans are evenly divided on the question.”
There was near unanimous agreement that voters disapproved of deception to accomplish political objectives.
However, the poll also found that “only nine percent (9%) feel most Americans are informed voters.”
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