Kind of funny to see the people ITT who are actively defending the GOP lies about the ACA by saying that, well, they actually aren’t lies after all. So, so stupid.
Look, everybody, Gruber did not write the ACA, nor did he vote on it, so his politically incorrect statements have no practical merit in the grand scheme of things.
Just toss his latest gaffe into the rightwing bubble that ONLY accepts negative ACA information & IGNORES all other objective, good info about the law working as it was designed.
You can ask Presidential advisor and Whitehouse consultant Gruber if he counted on stupid voters supporting ACA/Obamacare. Maybe he’s changed his mind now that his statements calling them stupid have been made public?
If it was such a great bill, why did the Obama administration rely on people like Gruber and Rahm Emanuel’s brother, Ezekiel, to spin the issues into something that stupid people could support?
Again, presumably for the same reason that, if it were such a bad bill, people like Palin and Boehner relied on stuff like “death panels” and “government-encouraged euthanasia” to spin the issues into something that stupid people could oppose.
I enjoy how people were/are attempting to justify the Obama administration and Democrat leaderships deliberate attempts to confuse the ACA/Obamacare issues in the hopes that stupid voters would support the bill/law.
I don’t believe Gruber’s various statements are going to play well with the SCOTUS when they have to consider the state mandates.
You should be aware that Palin and Boehner didn’t write the ACA/Obamacare bill. It appears that the WH, Democrat leadership, and advisors like Gruber, were afraid to tell the American voters the truth. It appears that they considered the bill indefensible and impossible to pass if they told the American voters the truth. Not telling the American voters the truth leads to speculation. The WH and Democrat leadership were more than happy to attack the speculation but were still unwilling to tell the American voters the truth about what was in the bill.
That’s…not actually a good conclusion to draw from what they did. The bill was profoundly complicated, and making predictions about what it’d do was also profoundly complicated, and in general anyone talking about the bill knew they’d have about 15 seconds of sound-bite to make their case on the evening news shows. So people who supported it drastically simplified the best-case predictions about the bill, to the point sometimes of outright misrepresentation. The people opposed to the bill did exactly the opposite.
EVERYONE was speculating about what the bill’s actual real-world effects would be. We’re only now starting to see those effects. Turns out, they’re pretty good overall.
The ACA/Obamacare bill was complicated and, it appears, deliberately confusing. The facts should have been publically debated. There shouldn’t have been speculation about what was ACTUALLY IN THE BILL. Why go to so much trouble to hide what was actually in the bill? Gruber won. And now, none of the Democrat leadership remembers meeting him, let alone praising Gruber’s input.
Is it okay for government to deceive the public to get laws passed? The answer is - NO.
None of that now. I’m asking you if one has to be stupid to support ACA. Do you think so?
No evasions there either. I asked you why you think the Dems worked so hard to get it passed, if it should have been so obvious to everyone as it is to you that it simply sucks. So, why? :dubious:
How many major pieces of legislation are you familiar with? How does the ACA compare to other major pieces of legislation? What evidence do you offer that it was deliberately confusing, other than this one dude’s off-the-cuff remarks that are being filtered for you by folks with a vested interest in persuading you Democrats are Very Bad People? How do you think it should have been written to be less complicated?
IOW, I don’t think you’ve thought this through carefully.
They were.
The speculation I was talking about was speculation about what THE BILL WOULD ACTUALLY DO. Nobody needed to speculate about what was in the bill.
Nobody did.
Nor, of course, is it okay for government to deceive the public to prevent the passage of laws; do you agree with that obvious corollary?
No it’s not OK. And it’s damn foolish to try in the age of instant communication. We knew the deception from day one. It wasn’t a secret. It was discussed all over the net. We knew we were being taxed, we knew we wouldn’t be allowed to keep our old insurance. We knew the deductibles weren’t a huge help to those just above the poverty line and we knew insurance prices would go up instead of down. The major points were known even before Pelosi said they had to pass the bill so that we can find out what’s in it.
Did you also know there are no death panels? That was all over the net too.
Repeating that, after all of the patient, contextual explanations you’ve been given, is a way of saying that you aren’t interested in being taken seriously. :rolleyes:
Why do you care? Why should anybody care, for that matter? Was it about defeating the Liberal Boogeymen for you, or was it about actually helping people, no matter who got credit or took heat?
Are you satisfied in describing Jonathan Gruber as a “dude”? We are trying to be reasonably accurate in our wording here. This “dude” was named 19th most powerful individual in US healthcare in 2006. This was before he did any work with the Obama administration. This “dude” earned millions of dollars from the State of Minnesota, Massachusetts etc. He was paid six figures for his work on ACA.
Calling Gruber a "dude is a bit like calling Christine Lagard and Angela Merkel a couple of “broads”.
Sorry, but it is the role of legislators to explain why the healthcare overhaul is necessary. Simply saying that we should trust them to pass a good bill and that some time in the future we will all see their infinite wisdom is putting the cart before the horse. The fog of controversy is prevalent in any major legislation. Good legislators can explain the proposed policy and get the voters to buy in. The Democrats were in such a head-rush to get anything passed, they never bothered to convince voters this bill is actually a good thing.
I will never be one to simply trust a politician who says “believe me this is a good thing and you will see in the future I was right.” That’s how we end up with “Mission Accomplished” signs waving in the midst of a quagmire.
You’re reading entirely too much into the word “dude,” dude. Yes, he’s an extremely influential dude. His remarks were off-the-cuff, and there’s an entire industry that is right now devoted to interpreting them in the worst possible light. It’s not acceptable to lie in order to get laws passed. It’s also not acceptable to distort what one dude (no matter how important) meant in order to get laws repealed. If you’re honest, you’ll acknowledge both as equally true.
This, for example, is exactly what it’s not okay to do in an effort to torpedo legislation. If your (and, to be fair, the entire right wing spin industry’s) interpretation is correct, one would predict that Pelosi wouldn’t have explained what was in the bill. Indeed, that’s what you say her job was, implying that she was refusing to do her job:
Someone reading your post in isolation would surely be misled about Pelosi’s speech, thinking that she was refusing to offer any details, that she wanted it to be voted on sight unseen. Surely you wouldn’t want to deceive anyone that way, given your dedicated to an informed electorate, so I trust in the future you won’t rely on such a mischaracterization of Pelosi.
And your point? Seriously. What point can you possibly be making here? The lies talked about in the video were obvious from the start. The tax that wasn’t a tax. the costs going down. It was a known stack of lies.
There is nothing remotely contextual about it. It was all a huge lie from day one. the video is just icing on the cake.
That is fucking hilarious. Insurance prices went up. People got screwed out of their old policies. People lost their doctor. businesses dropped their insurance. Employees had their hours cut back back. High deductibles make the insurance useless.
The credit went where it was due. Pelosi and Reid were the architects of one of the worst political defeats ever.
There’s enough rightwing nonsense, deception, & all-around horse shit in this thread to fill a fuckin’ dumpster, but this is the attitude that I really want to address because it (a) cuts to the heart of conservative giddiness at the upcoming SCOTUS challenge & (b) explains why many (though by no means all) ACA proponents are equally as nervous.
So, let’s get this straight: You are expecting the US Supreme Court to take a look at Gruber’s statements here, in addition to his gaffes that were outed a few months ago, and use them to blindly cast aside ALL objectivity - which, make no mistake, is the exact thing that SCOTUS would be doing in this situation - in order to automatically gut the HC.Gov subsidies in spite of the obvious (and I would personally argue downright preposterous) weaknesses of the challengers’ arguments.
Okaaayyyy…
Look, say what you want about Gruber, but the bottom line about him is that he DID NOT - I repeat DID NOT - write the ACA; he DID NOT vote on the law in Congress because he HAS NOT EVER BEEN a member of Congress. Yes, he needs to be held accountable for his statements, but his gaffes have no legal basis whatsoever to affect the SCOTUS case.
Conservatives are upbeat about the SCOTUS case because they automatically assume that the GOP majority will invalidate the subsidies just because Obamacare is bad to conservatives. That’s a blatant dereliction of objectivity, and it would immediately invalidate the legitimacy of this iteration of the Court.
Aw, you poor thing. Locked in a closet watching the voting returns on Fox were you? It was on other networks too. The results were the same. Apparently many more millions disagreed with the results.
As to why the Dems worked so hard to fuck things up so badly, well that’s a mystery. What happened was predicted ahead of time.