Home / General / “If neither the facts nor the law are on your side, pound the asinine right-wing talking points.”

“If neither the facts nor the law are on your side, pound the asinine right-wing talking points.”

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You may be aware of the latest ACA faux scandal, conveniently timed to distract people from the now very real possibility that the Supreme Court will use deeply silly arguments to strip health coverage from millions of people. It involves something someone said on a videotape that allegedly destroys the foundation of the ACA or some such.

Now, it probably won’t come as a surprise to you to know that this video involves Jontahan Gruber, the consultant who if I understand current Republican doctrine was solely responsible for initiating, writing, amending, and casting votes in Congress for the Affordable Care Act. He’s been cast in this vastly exaggerated role in part because his stray comments (contradicting his contemporaneous comments and assumptions) about the availability of subsidies on the federal exchanges have been used as the piece of cherry skin in the midst of 3,000 acres of apple trees that turn the land into a cherry orchard. Now, I’m sure Gruber is a very fine health care economist who played a valuable role in the creation of the ACA (just ask him!) And I will also say that I’m an academic, and if you go through the archives of this blog you’ll find any number of poorly-thought-out arguments that don’t hold up. If much of my extemporaneous speech was being recorded I’m sure the problem would be worse. On the other hand, I have never been a self-appointed PR person for major reform legislation. If you’re determined to take on that role, you really should choose your words with more care and be sure as possible that what you’re saying is accurate.  Don’t do things like calling voters who don’t pay careful attention to policy details “stupid,” not least because it’s not actually true. (Gruber seems to think of himself as a masterful rhetorical salesman; I’m sure his heart is in the right place, but I’ve seen strikingly little evidence of that.)

All this said, this controversy is almost as dumb as Halbig trooferism itself. If you look at the quote, what’s true or at least truish is not damning, and what isn’t true also isn’t damning:

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO [Congressional Budget Office] scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… 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 for the thing to pass….Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.

On the CBO thing — look, at the margin legislation is going to be written so as to get the more favorable CBO projection. Having the mandate not scored as a tax for CBO purposes is a minor, largely arbitrary distinction in order to placate the arbitrary wishes of some conservative Democrats is absolutely bog-standard politics, not some sort of scandal. And for contemporary Republicans to complain about this…cool story, bro. And as for the fact that John Roberts declared this a tax rather than a penalty — 1)it’s a distinction with no actual substantive difference, and 2)it was made necessary only because of his refusal to apply more than 70 years of settled commerce clause precedent and more than 200 years of Necessary and Proper clause precedent, so not my problem as someone who would apply said precedents.

The second point Gruber is making isn’t really coherent enough to make sense of, but what Gruber seems to be describing here is not the Affordable Care Act per se, but “all public health care provision and all health care insurance.” Having the healthy pay for the sick is how all provision of health care works. Even in the absence of a mandate to purchase health insurance, this is how it works — Medicare is paid for by taxes on the more healthy, private insurance “overcharges” the more healthy to pay for the sick, and people who forego insurance voluntarily are covered by guarantees of emergency care that are paid for by taxes of the more healthy. I’m honestly baffled as to what Gruber is even getting at here; this aspect of essentially all health care provision is also common to the ACA, as is entirely transparent. The mandate was designed to prevent younger and healthier people from free riding, as was not only not a secret but the well-understood point. The fact that Medicare remains enormously popular despite having this feature would seem to suggest that this “news” “getting out” would not be fatal to the ACA.  Taken at face value, Gruber’s assertion is bizarre.

My guess is that what Gruber is getting at is that proponents of the ACA reemphasized its redistributive aspects and emphasized its benefits. Which…cue Claude Rains. I mean, this idea that people proposing legislation are responsible for making the case for it and an (exceedingly stupid) case against is just ludicrous bad faith.

But this does bring us to a further layer of derp. If the ACA must be discredited because the public didn’t know that…it functioned like all forms of insurance, what does that say about the opposition? If one can only make a case against the ACA by talking about DEATH PANELS and NATIONALIZING ONE SEVENTH OF THE NATIONAL ECONOMY and THE MOOPS INVADED SPAIN etc. etc. etc. then opposition to the ACA is super-ultra-extra discredited and clearly we must all concede that the Affordable Care Act is the greatest legislative enactment in known human history.

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