Jonathan Gruber, a MIT economist and staunch defender of O’Care, helped to write Obamacare. At least twice in public Mr. Gruber has made assertions that support the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last week in Halbig v. Burwell that, in the plain language of O’Care, subsidies for health insurance can only be delivered through state, not federal, exchanges. Yet the Obama administration claims this ignores the clear intent of the law.
In a video from 2012, Mr. Gruber told a nonprofit group, “If you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.”
It doesn’t get much more straightforward than that, but Mr. Gruber is now fuzzy on why he said what he did. As The Wall Street Journal notes, perhaps it was because it was the truth. “Liberals feared some states wouldn’t set up exchanges, so they deliberately wrote incentives into the law so the states would do so.”
Michael F. Cannon, The Cato Institute’s “health care freedom fighter,” points out, “Simply put, the President is breaking the law.”
