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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By Cheryl K. Chumley - The Washington Times - Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Jonathan Gruber, the White House adviser infamously captured on video
crediting Obamacare’s passage to the “stupidity” of the American people,
admitted in a 2009 policy brief that the health care package was
unaffordable — and the way to trim costs was to make the insured pay for
expensive treatments.
The Daily Caller first reported the existence of the policy brief, which
included Mr. Gruber’s view that Obamacare was absent any cost controls, and
could ultimately prove unsustainable. At the time of his assessment, Mr.
Gruber had already served on President Obama’s transition team and had
counseled him in the Oval Office, The Daily Caller reported.
“The problem is it starts to go hand in hand with the mandate — you can’t
mandate insurance that’s not affordable. This is going to be a major issue
,” Mr. Gruber said in his Oct. 2, 2009, lecture, which was then put into
the form of a written policy brief.
“So what’s different this time? Why are we closer than we’ve ever been
before? Because there are no cost controls in these proposals. Because this
bill’s about coverage. Which is good! Why should we hold 48 million
uninsured people hostage to the fact that we don’t yet know how to control
costs in a political acceptable way? Let’s get the people covered and then
let’s do cost control,” he went on, the brief shows.
Mr. Gruber concluded the only way to keep down Obamacare costs would be to
deny treatment.
“The real substance of cost control is all about a single thing: telling
patients they can’t have something they want,” he said, The Daily Caller
reported. “It’s about telling patients, ‘That surgery doesn’t do any
good, so if you want it, you have to pay the full cost.’”
Mr. Gruber then suggested there was nothing wrong with telling Americans
that they had to pay for expensive medical treatments themselves.
“There’s no reason the American health care system can’t be, ‘you can
have whatever you want, you just have to pay for it.’ That’s what we do in
other walks of life,” he said, The Daily Caller reported. “We don’t say
everyone has to have a large screen TV. If you want a large screen TV, you
have to pay for it. Basically, the notion would be to move to a level where
everyone has a solid basic insurance level of coverage. Above that, people
pay on their own, without tax-subsidized dollars, to buy a higher level of
coverage.”
Mr. Obama pushed forward the idea of Obamacare in part by claiming that the
reform wouldn’t bring higher costs — but even Mr. Gruber admitted as far
back as 2012 that the claim just wasn’t true.
“I wish that President Obama could have stood up and said, ‘You know, I
don’t know if this bill is going to control costs. It might, it might not.
We’re doing our best,” he said, during a 2012 podcast from San Francisco. |
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