Confiscating the instruments of ObamaCare fraud

In response to 5th Video Shows Gruber Laughing At and Mocking ObamaCare Critic’s Accurate Predictions:

Shed no tears for Jonathan Gruber, fair Debra, for he was well-compensated for his perfidy, and we were forced to pay him.  I want to get my money’s worth out of him – and not only by taking steps to correct the hideous ObamaCare mistake.  I want to make sure the American people don’t get fooled like this again.  Gruber has given us a comprehensive inventory of the instruments of fraud.  Let us now set about confiscating them, so that nobody who thinks like this can ever seize control over a single American citizen’s life, ever again.

That’s going to be a tall order, because these are some heavy-duty power tools, rusted and chipped from decades of work on reducing the liberty of Americans and drilling into our bank accounts.  A few of the major techniques spotlighted by Gruber include:

1. Gaming budgetary predictions to make Big Government programs look cheaper than they are: We knew this was a big part of ObamaCare all along.  It was absurdly obvious that its big costs were pushed out beyond Year 10 in the original projections, to escape the 10-year Congressional Budget Office projection window.  The only way to protect ourselves from this kind of fraud is to forbid the federal government to design plans big enough to be gamed this way.  Given the inability of today’s Congress to influence tomorrow’s legislators with anything but the sledgehammer of debt, it’s silly to let any of them speak of what will happen in the “out years” anyway.  Let’s be especially careful to avoid any “deal” where liberals get what they want today, and will supposedly give us something in return – spending cuts, border security – at some vague point in the future, on the far side of the next election.

2. Hidden taxes: Gruber cackling about the “Cadillac tax” as a ruse based on a “basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter” illustrates how so many taxes are hidden from the American people, by lumping them on private-sector companies (in this case, insurance providers) who then pass the taxes along to us, folded into higher prices.  The only real way to protect ourselves from that scam is to have a far more simple and transparent tax system, perhaps along the lines of the Fair Tax, when all taxation occurs once, at the point of consumption.

3. Preying on the public’s sensibilities: Gruber hails Obama’s brilliance at exaggerating and exploiting the plight of the uninsured, even though, as Gruber put it, “he knew when he was running for president that quite frankly the American public doesn’t actually care that much about the uninsured.”  One reason for that is the American people’s (correct) perception that there were never as many hard-core uninsured as Obama claimed.  He was prone to include illegal aliens in his higher totals, and he counted people who chose not to purchase insurance, or who were only temporarily without coverage.  The American people should learn to pay better attention to debunking efforts directed at these exaggerated talking points.  It is safe to assume that any politician who demands money and power be seized from the law-abiding to benefit some preferred constituency is probably exaggerating the size of that constituency; look for the real numbers.  (Another common version of this tactic occurs during “income inequality” debates, when the Left pretends that people are lifelong residents of whatever income bracket they occupy, discounting mobility, misfortune for the temporarily well-off, and the way people naturally accumulate assets as they age.)

4. Promising that government regulation can make things cheaper: The flip side of Gruber’s comment about America’s relative lack of concern for the uninsured was his contention that most people really only cared about Obama’s ridiculous promise that he’d “bend the cost curve down” and save everyone in America at least $2500 on their annual insurance costs.  We’re hearing another variation on this scam in Obama’s Net Neutrality promise that the government can hyper-regulate a discount on Internet access.  When will the American people learn that regulatory power never makes things cheaper, not the way politicians promise, and not without some very unpleasant “unforeseen consequences?”  Market forces bring healthy price reductions from competition and increased supply.  Every political promise to legislate lower prices is a con.

5. Using Treasury money to paper over failure: Gruber saluted Ted Kennedy and “smart people in Massachusetts” for their cunning in devising “a way to rip off the feds for about $400 million a year” to cover the cost of Romneycare.  This illustrates the importance of keeping the federal government small and poor, so that state governments cannot raid the Treasury and force residents of the other 49 states to pay for their folly.  As long as the federal government is huge, poorly budgeted, and allowed to spend money it doesn’t have, every state-level left-wing disaster artist knows that Uncle Sugar will be there to bail him out.  This explains a lot of the destructive policies passed years ago, which left their states teetering on the edge of bankruptcy today.  The federal government is the engine of deficit spending.  Deficit spending is theft, and to a large extent, it’s theft from children.  Do not allow states to concoct schemes that can be bailed out by Washington, and don’t let Washington loot the taxpayers of tomorrow to build a cash cushion for today’s follies.