A sixth video of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber surfaced, where he explains how Democrats lied to sell Obamacare to the “stupid voters,” this time noting how taxes were purposefully “mislabeled” to get the bill passed.
The newest video shows Gruber talking about the lies shoring up Obamacare and features his explanation of how taxes for employer-based healthcare insurance policies were purposefully mislabeled. He also noted that the writers of the bill took pains to hide from voters whom these taxes would hit.
Gruber was addressing the “Cadillac tax,” sold as a tax only on “the rich” because it was a tax on expensive insurance plans that only eight percent of Americans currently have. The tax on these expensive plans was to be at 40 percent — this with the expectation that such high-dollar plans might eventually be canceled.
Gruber said that the trick to selling the “Cadillac tax” was to claim it was a tax on insurance policies and not “people.”
“[T]he only way we could get rid of it was first by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people when we all know it’s a tax on people who hold those insurance plans,” Gruber says on the video.
But the next sneaky part of the Obamacare plan is that the “Cadillac tax” is tied to the slow-growing Consumer Price Index — not the rate of the more quickly growing medical inflation rate.
This means that as time goes on, more employer insurance plans would suddenly be considered a “Cadillac” plan and more and more people would find themselves whacked with the 40 percent tax.
“What that means is the tax that starts out hitting only eight percent of the insurance plans essentially amounts over the next 20 years essentially getting rid of the exclusion for employer sponsored plans,” the President’s Obamacare expert said.
The long-term purpose of this tax was to make as many employer-based healthcare plans as possible too expensive to maintain, thereby getting them canceled and leaving only the government offering healthcare to the public. It was a long-term plan to usher in a single payer, government-sponsored healthcare system — something Democrats all denied as Obamacare was being sold to the public.
All this was hidden from voters as Obamacre was being crafted.
Gruber, who received hundreds of thousands of tax dollars for his work on Obamacare and millions from consulting with states on the law, has drawn criticism for exposing Obama’s “master strategy” to “confuse” people in order to get Obamacare passed into law.
The revelations of this mountain of lies has caused Democrats to run from his comments and sent the White House scrambling to distance itself from his comments.
Gruber is also now a target for Republicans who are planning to call him to testify before Congress.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter: @warnerthuston. Email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.