A video that surfaced last Friday shows MIT professor and Obamacare consultant Jonathan Gruber openly admitting in a panel discussion that the healthcare law was written in a “tortured way” to prevent the CBO from scoring the mandate as taxes and to mask the necessary redistribution of money from the healthy to the sick.

The video comes from an October 17, 2013 panel discussion at the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, which included health economist Mark Pauly. The remarks were first highlighted Sunday by The Daily Caller.

The law’s “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter,” said Gruber, were “critical” to passing the president’s signature legislative achievement. Though Gruber says he wishes it could have been passed transparently, the ends justifies the means.

Here’s the partial transcript:

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that.  

In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in—you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money—it would not have passed…

Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically—call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever—but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass…

Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.

Video via WFB.