MIT Professor of Economics Dr. Jonathan Gruber served as a technical consultant to the Obama Administration and worked with both the Administration and Congress to help craft Obamacare.
On Wednesday evening, he appeared on the Hugh Hewitt radio show to defend the President's signature legislation.
During the first part of the interview, Gruber refused to admit the President's "keep your healthcare" statement was a lie or even misleading. The economist insisted the President was only simplifying.
However, in the final segment of the interview, host Hewitt exposed the hypocrisy in Gruber's logic enticing an admission that the American people were misled and the program necessitates that healthy people pay more for their insurance coverage.
Hewitt:
Dr. Gruber, if a student of yours had plagiarized fifteen percent of a paper he turned in, would he be expelled from MIT?
Gruber:
He’d certainly be up for disciplinary action, absolutely.
Hewitt:
And so if the President misled fifteen percent of the American people, and only fifteen percent, isn’t that a deception of the sort Ron Johnson’s talking about?
Gruber:
Okay, the President, he did mislead a small share of the U.S. population. It’s not fifteen percent. As I said, it’s on the order of two to four percent.
Hewitt:
And so if your student had only plagiarized two to four percent of his paper, would he still be in trouble?
Gruber:
Probably, yeah.
A few minutes later Hewitt played a clip of Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La) talking about her legislation created to fix the Obama lie. Hewitt asked about possible legislative fixes. Gruber said the proposed fixes would hurt Obamacare because, by necessity, healthy people have to pay more:
What they’re [the supporters of the Obamacare fix] saying is basically, they’re saying there should be a free lunch. Here’s where I disagree with them, and I don’t care if they’re Democrats. They’re wrong. Basically, they’re saying that there should be a free lunch, that we should make insurance affordable for the sick, but not make it more expensive for the healthy. That’s not the way insurance works. Insurance is the healthy and the sick pooling together to pay one fair price, which is what the American public wants. By an overwhelming majority, the American public wants fair insurance markets. Fair insurance markets mean the healthy pay more. That’s what fair insurance markets mean. So what Landrieu and Feinstein are those, they’re just not understanding basic economics. They’re claiming you can have it both ways. They’re claiming we can fix insurance markets and yet not make people pay more, and that’s simply wrong.
