"I cannot tell a lie" |
Another
video
has surfaced of Jonathan Gruber saying cringe-worthy
things about Obamacare. Gruber is an
MIT economist and health care
expert who worked
as a number cruncher for the White House during the push to enact
Obamacare. Here’s what he said last year
regarding the way political pressures distorted the legislative process:
This bill was
written in a tortured way to make sure CBO [Congressional Budget Office] did
not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill
dies. So it’s written to do that.
In terms of
risk-rated subsidies, in a law that said health people are gonna pay in — if it
made explicit that healthy people are gonna pay in, sick people get money, it
would not have passed. Okay, 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 to get anything to
pass.
Conservatives
are
up in
arms, particularly over the “stupidity” part, convinced that Gruber’s
comments expose
the
dirty truth of modern liberalism:
It’s a conspiracy of snooty technocrats confident their superior brains
and sociological analyses authorize them to control the everyday lives of the
smelly masses, the rednecks and rubes too foolish to make the right choices,
too stupid to know what’s good for them.
But let’s ignore that ridiculous
argument and consider what Gruber was actually
saying: that for any legislation to pass it must be politically
presentable, it must not afford its opponents an easy target. And that applies
to Obamacare in two ways. First,
Democrats could not allow the individual mandate to be seen – by the CBO or the
public – as a tax. Second, the essence
of Obamacare is a transfer
of health insurance dollars from the young, rich and healthy to the old,
poor and sick; the public would never have allowed such governmental redistribution,
so it had to be disguised. And Gruber
was also saying that it was easy to slip those two deceptions past an American
public that doesn’t
closely follow healthcare policy debates.
Charles Krauthammer charges
that, “in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive.” Is he wrong?
It’s true, as Brian
Beutler protests, that Obamacare’s legislative process was more transparent
than most (compared to say Bush’s 2003 Medicare expansion or the run up to the
Iraq War). And it’s true, as Neil
Irwin concedes, that certain aspects of the law itself (not the process) were
deliberately obscured; and that is a “commonplace” tactic
that's been employed by both parties on many occasions. So who’s responsible for the fact that the American
public does not really understand
Obamacare? Andrew Sullivan blames
liberals and the administration for not making a better and clearer case
for the law. But many pundits, such as Paul
Krugman, Jonathan
Cohn, Ezra
Klein and Jonathan
Chait,
have been explaining it clearly for years.
Gruber himself even wrote a comic
book to make it easily understandable!
And conservatives, of course, have invested an enormous about of time
and energy lying
about the very law they now accuse of deceit and deception. The national press did a bad job of covering
all this, as they always do, by focusing on optics and neglecting substance. But if any individual wanted to know more
about the law, they could have quickly and easily done so – as long as they turned
off Fox News. The one actual,
explicit lie used to sell Obamacare was the president’s promise that, “If
you like your health plan, you can keep it.”
He knew
it was a lie when he said it, but he also knew that admitting that 7 or 8
million people would have their policies regulated away – even though they’d be
replaced
with better ones – might have put the whole law in jeopardy. The entire structure of American political
discourse worked against an honest assessment of the law.
But let’s make the real
confession. There is one fundamental lie
liberals have made and continue to make about Obamacare, and it’s a lie of
omission. The components, the details,
the numbers have been endlessly examined, analyzed and debated. But the real meaning of the law has, for the
most part, not been adequately addressed.
What is its deeper significance?
What is it really about? Redistribution. Both Gruber’s confession and conservative
complaints really boil down to this one point: Obamacare severs the connection
between income and healthcare coverage; it indirectly redistributes money from
the rich, young and healthy to the poor, old and sick. The “indirectly” in that last sentence is
what the current controversy is really about.
Gruber both regrets the necessity of that indirection and gloats over
its devious utility. And that gloating
gives conservatives cover to deplore its dishonesty, though in reality they only
lament its effectiveness.
But should we deplore its dishonesty? Only if we care
about American democracy. Only if we
wish it to be more rational and effective.
Sullivan puts
it nicely:
If someone were
willing to explain the ACA in simple, clear and honest terms, I think most
Americans would back it . . . I refuse to believe that a democracy has to
operate this way for change to occur. Gruber’s arrogance and condescension are
just meta-phenomena of this deeper dysfunction. Someone needs to treat
Americans as adults again before this democracy can regain the credibility it
so desperately needs to endure.
But is Sullivan right that Obamacare
could have withstood a thoroughly candid presentation? Would a majority of Americans have supported
it, even knowing the governmental redistribution that lay at its heart? The answer is not clear, but I think probably
not. The idea of redistribution, explicitly promoted, would probably have
been too unnerving.
We see that the distrust of
Obamacare is primarily ideological. American instincts are generally conservative:
they fear centralized authority, they mistrust regulation, they insist that
each person is the master of his own fate.
But American instincts constantly conflict with American interests. Modern society would not be livable without
the welfare and regulatory state that liberals have created and conservatives
threaten, and Americans affirm that every time they deposit their social
security checks and present their Medicare cards. American conservatism evaporates at the door of
the unemployment office. Put more
prosaically, the American people are ideologically conservative but
operationally liberal, as has been noted
many times.
That’s the real reason public
policy is often deceptive. Social
Security pretends to give you back the money you paid in, but it actually pays
more, relative to income, to those who made less. So liberal laws must be dressed up in
conservative clothing. Many liberals, possibly
including Obama himself, would have preferred single
payer healthcare but considered it politically unpalatable, so they offered
a market-friendly
program
cooked up in a right-wing
think tank and instituted by a Republican
governor. Many Americans dislike
Obamacare
(some hate it for the evil
Satanic, Islamic, Communist conspiracy it is!) while they like
most Obamacare provisions.
Kentuckians, for example, hate
Obamacare but love Kynect,
their state’s implementation of the Obamacare exchange; but they returned to
the Senate Republican Mitch McConnell, who has explicitly
vowed to repeal Obamacare yet who refused
to condemn Kynect when
cornered in front of a Kentucky audience!
In the last election people all over the country voted
for liberal policies like marijuana liberalization and minimum wage
increases while voting into office conservatives staunchly opposed to those
very policies. Huh?
In effect, Americans want to be
lied to. They want it both ways: to
enjoy their liberal dessert while believing it’s sturdy conservative fare. This is the real deception at the core of
this debate: the American people are
kidding themselves. They’re not
stupid, as Gruber and some liberals believe, nor are they solid
conservatives. They’re inconsistent, and unaware of it. And that encourages politicians and pundits to
see what they want to see. Conservative operatives
dream of an America
utterly given over to its deepest conservative instincts, but they’re woken
from the dream by picketers angrily cursing any cuts to Medicare. And liberals can never understand why
Americans don’t follow them out of the laissez-faire
wilderness into the social democratic Promised Land. A consummate seduction of the American public
eludes them both, though conservatives whisper sweet poetry and liberals offer
alluring gifts.
But you don’t practice politics
with the public you
wish you had. Ultimately, Americans
want to be told the truth. And they
deserve the truth. Liberals need to come
clean. The Democratic Party is the party
of redistribution, and it should damn well act
like it! That’s not socialism or
authoritarianism – conservative paranoia to the contrary – it’s the pragmatic
amelioration of the worst inequities of modern society. An economy that provides more and more to
those at the top but demands more and more from everyone else does not satisfy
the demands of democracy and justice. Unfair
economics is as destructive to democracy as dishonest politics. If liberalism is not about justice for
working people then it becomes little more than a loose confederation of
identity groups, fighting over the scraps of a long gone shared
prosperity. It abdicates its claim to
universalism, it loses its fire and its soul.
And so it
has.
Gruber thought he bravely spoke
the truth of American politics, that the people are so stupid that good policy
must be deceitful policy. But Gruber’s
story is really one of liberal cowardice. And there’s so much of our current misfortune
that would be greatly improved with just a little more liberal courage. Human nature being what it is, game-playing
cannot be removed from politics. But why
can’t liberals successfully balance cunning and conviction? And can they do the ceaseless, thankless work
of educating the public about what they stand for and why? And most importantly, can they learn to trust
the people again? The people are not
stupid, they have as many practical
instincts as conservative ones; they are amenable to prudential, fair,
liberal policy that would benefit them and strengthen the country. They’re merely waiting for leadership that both
works for them and respects them. Conservatism,
in its modern incarnation as plutocratic propaganda factory, does neither. Timid liberalism can only do the former. Only confident and candid liberalism can do
both.
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