Jonathan Gruber Cutely Likens Obamacare Victims to Those “Falling Off A Building”

When the “Gruber-gate” story broke last fall, TIME’s Kate Pickert explained that the scandal represented no more than a “flash of candor.” 

Both sides lied, she said. 

Supporters of the law did, in fact, do their best to obscure unpopular provisions—like new taxes. But Republican opponents were just as deceptive in their efforts to exaggerate the law’s potential negative effects.

Journalists, she claimed, “focused more on the politics of the bill than its policies,” and therefore didn’t explain Obamacare well enough. 

And that’s why Americans weren’t aware that the law aimed — through the Cadillac tax — to eliminate 156 million workers’ job-based health insurance.

Pickert summarized a few secrets Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber shared in his now-controversial speeches:

• In one video, Gruber says that if the public had really understood that the law would require healthy people to pay for sick people, it wouldn’t have passed. 
• He also says that the penalty for eschewing health insurance is a “tax,” though Democrats avoided that word because it would have made the law politically unfeasible. 
• In another video, Gruber explains that a new ACA tax on high-cost health plans supposedly levied on insurers would actually be passed through to consumers.

Pickert confesses that she knew the inner workings of Obamacare, since Gruber had talked with her “many times over the past six years.” 

In one conversation she found worthy of sharing, Gruber reportedly described the Cadillac tax with an analogy reminiscent of the fate of 9/11 victims in the Twin Towers:

In pitching the ACA, Democrats had been adamant that the law would support and sustain the employer-based system, not erode it. But Gruber knew better and he told me so, likening workers being kicked off job-based health plans to people “falling off a building,” an outcome that architects of the ACA knew was likely and had planned for.

People falling off a building. 

Isn’t that adorable?

Ms. Pickert apparently believes Gruber’s openness with his private audiences is refreshing. She fails to address why the American public wasn’t privy to Gruber’s secrets.

But, you see, if America had known Obamacare would kill job-based coverage, Obama would have lost his bid for reelection.

And in the world of Kate Pickert and her ilk, that would have been a far worse outcome than falling off a building.