Jonathan Gruber, Ph. D., knows far too much for the comfort of either Democrats or establishment Republicans. On Monday (10 November) the activist group American Commitment published the first old video of Gruber talking about “Obamacare,” the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. He said then: to describe the Obamacare funding method transparently would doom the bill to fail. He also called the American voter “stupid.” In the days since, Fox News Channel (and no other media outlet) have made much of this and other footage of Gruber saying the same.

But Jonathan Gruber said much more. This morning someone pointed out another lecture Gruber gave to a sympathetic audience. And in that lecture (and at least one other), Gruber admitted the one reason his earlier experiment in subsidized health insurance worked as well as it does. The federal government pays for a State program. Specifically it pays for the mandatory health insurance program in Massachusetts.

Gruber called this “the dirty secret” of the Massachusetts plan. But the plan has another, dirtier secret. Willard “Mitt” Romney governed Massachusetts then. And furthermore, Gov. Romney knew all about that subsidy. He had to, or he could never have signed it in good conscience.

What Gruber said of Romneycare and Obamacare

De facto President Obama, Vice-President Biden, and several senior advisers applaud when the House of Representatives takes up Obamacare and “deems it passed.” Photo: The White House

Fox and Friends aired several clips of Jonathan Gruber videos in a segment this morning (14 November). In several, Gruber speaks of deceiving the American people to sell his true goals.

The American public don’t much care about the uninsured. The uninsured don’t much care about the uninsured; they think they’ll live forever. What they care about is cost.

But Fox also aired a clip from a nearly hour-long speech Gruber gave on 18 January 2012 to a conference at Noblis, a “think tank” at Falls Church, Virginia. (The name might derive from the French expression, Noblesse oblige.) There Gruber described the Massachusetts health-care plan, or “Romneycare.” He and others founded this plan on “a three-legged stool”:

1. Forbidding insurers to “discriminate” against those with pre-existing illness,
2. A minimum-coverage mandate for individuals, and
3. Subsidies so those same people could afford to obey that mandate.

He said the Massachusetts plan worked well, and he always planned to have it work for the federal government.

Then he made one salient admission:

The dirty secret is, the feds paid for our program.

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Specifically, Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) arranged 400 million dollars in annual grants to Massachusetts to fund this plan. And again, Mitt Romney knew this.

Gruber knows something else, that he told Noblis and then told another audience two months later: the federal government cannot ask another country to fund its program. The funding must come from higher taxes.

That explains why Gruber laid such emphasis on “lack of transparency” to the American Health Economics Conference at the Wharton School last year.

Fox News Channel glosses over the Romney angle

But Fox News Channel has a problem, too. They hammer Prof. Gruber, and they hammer Barack Obama. But what of Mitt Romney? After all, Romney hired Gruber, did he not?

Imagine how the Election of 2012 might have played out, had Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) known about the Noblis speech and campaigned on it. Would Republican voters still have given Romney enough delegates to nominate him for President? Or might they have nominated someone else, perhaps even Rep. Paul himself?

And consider this: Gruber said, as early as the start of primary season in 2012, that Romney has very dirty hands. Gruber even said, “Candidate Romney won’t tell you this today.” Of course he wouldn’t.

Readers can play the full Noblis speech below. (CNAV has cued it to Gruber speaking of a more ambitious federal plan, and about “dirty secrets.”) To play the Book TV video, follow the link; Book TV won’t allow embedding.

And where is now the case for the Republican establishment? Do they not have at least as much guilt as does Obama? Did not Mitt Romney start the process of that “incremental universalism” of which Gruber also speaks? (Play the Book TV video; he says it then.)

Perhaps the country is better off, even considering the bad job Obama has done as de facto President, not having elected Mitt Romney in 2012 after all. And perhaps this gives the American people the more reason to vote for a completely independent candidate.

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