GRUBER ON OBAMACARE

He really didn't break any news

Economist Jonathan Gruber has become a household name in the nation's capital and the media for saying that Democrats disguised unpopular provisions of the health care reform bill in order to win Congress' approval. Yet his comments didn't reveal anything about the substance of the 2010 Affordable Care Act that the public didn't already know. For someone who supposedly had a front-row seat, Gruber missed how well the monthslong debate over the act conveyed what it would do and why.

Gruber, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, helped the Obama administration develop its health care reform plan by modeling the likely effects of various provisions. In recent months, opponents of the law have unearthed recordings of Gruber telling audiences in 2011 and 2012 that lawmakers wrote the law in a needlessly complex way to hide the fact that healthy individuals would be required to cover more of the cost of insuring the sick and that a tax on high-end insurance plans would eventually apply to all employer-sponsored policies.

Happily, we live in an era of exceptional access to information by and about government, enabling anyone who's paying attention to suss out hidden agendas. The costs and taxes that Gruber said lawmakers were trying to conceal? They were discussed openly by the Congressional Budget Office and right-of-center think tanks, among many others. As a result, the central issues in health care reform have long been clear to the public regardless of the cloud of spin: whether to provide subsidized health care to more Americans who can't afford it, to make coverage available to more sick people by sharing more of the cost with everyone else, and to slow the increase in costs by promoting preventive medicine and higher quality care.

FROM AN EDITORIAL IN THE LOS ANGELES TIMES