CNN: Hey, who's up for a fourth Gruber video?

If so, you may have to wait for a while, because Jake Tapper’s post features a clip from his show yesterday instead (at the time of writing this post), interviewing new Energy chair James Inhofe. Instead, Tapper reports on the emerging video and describes it as not quite providing the smoking-gun moments of the first three. However, Jonathan Gruber’s chat in this case took place ten days before the bill passed in March 2010 and again described ObamaCare as a way to fool the public that government was doing something about cost control, when in fact Gruber admitted that he had no idea whether the bill would control costs at all:

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In this fourth video, Gruber’s language is not as stark as in three previous instances, but his suggestion that Obamacare proponents engaged in less-than-honest salesmanship remains.

“Barack Obama’s not a stupid man, okay?” Gruber said in his remarks at the College of the Holy Cross on March 11, 2010. “He knew when he was running for president that quite frankly the American public doesn’t actually care that much about the uninsured….What the American public cares about is costs. And that’s why even though the bill that they made is 90% health insurance coverage and 10% about cost control, all you ever hear people talk about is cost control. How it’s going to lower the cost of health care, that’s all they talk about. Why? Because that’s what people want to hear about because a majority of American care about health care costs.” …

Gruber said the measures in the bill that attempt to lower costs constitute a “spaghetti approach” — throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. And while preferable to the status quo, Gruber said he could offer no guarantee that any of the measures would work.What are the Obamacare trade-offs

“The only way we’re going to stop our country from being a latter day Roman Empire and falling under its own weight is getting control of the growth rate of health care costs,” he said. “The problem is we don’t know how.” Experts “know what the problem is,” he said. “Our providers are paid enormously high. In the 1950s surgeons are middle class guys like professors…Now they live on the Hamptons, the Cape, they’re like investment bankers.”

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Remember how Barack Obama insisted that the bill would “bend the cost curve downward”? Gruber tells his audience at nearly the same time that they have no idea how to do that, and that the bill was the equivalent of spitballing. Don’t forget that at the same time as Gruber’s saying this — in fact, almost exactly the same time — Nancy Pelosi was saying this:

You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention—it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.

There was a lot of fogginess in this effort — most of it deliberate.

This video, although perhaps lacking the infuriating smugness and contempt exhibited by Gruber in other venues, might be more of a problem for Democrats. The architect of the bill isn’t just mocking stupidity and celebrating deceit and dishonesty in the process; he’s admitting that the bill itself is just an uncontrolled experiment. On Outnumbered, the panel discusses the strategies that Republicans can employ with Gruber in a discussion that took place prior to the emergence of this video. It’s time to get Gruber under oath and talk about his earlier admission that the bill intentionally prevented subsidies from being paid out of a federal exchange, as well as an explanation of his “spaghetti approach” and experimentation with tens of millions of people who already had the health insurance they wanted.

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Plus, as Kirsten Powers argues, the media should go on trial here as well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBOoym2hQKg

 

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