Liberals cringe as Obamacare architect caught telling truth

For those who would like to see Obamacare scrapped and replaced — which is most Americans, according to the latest polling — Jonathan Gruber is the gift that keeps on giving.

For President Barack Obama and Democrats vested in the legacy of Obamacare, he’s an unmitigated nightmare.

For those unfamiliar with Gruber, he’s not only the Massachusetts Institute of Technology health economist who designed Obamacare, he’s the guy who’s not afraid to say what liberals are really thinking.

Let’s go through a few examples of his candidness.

He’s the godfather of the 2006 Massachusetts health care law, and he says that law, signed by then-Gov. Mitt Romney, became the foundation for Obamacare. When Romney tried to wriggle out of that association during the 2012 presidential campaign, Gruber minced no words: “They’re the same f-ing bill.”

Or consider what Gruber told The Washington Post this year when, after an expansion of Medicaid coverage in Oregon, officials there saw a spike in emergency room visits:

“I would view (the study) as part of a broader set of evidence that covering people with health insurance doesn’t save money. That was sometimes a misleading motivator for the Affordable Care Act. The law isn’t designed to save money. It’s designed to improve health, and that’s going to cost money.”

The law isn’t designed to save money? That’s a big “ouch” for Obamacare supporters who have been telling us the exact opposite all these years.

Now surfaces a video of Gruber crediting “the stupidity of the American voter” as the reason Democrats were able to pass Obamacare.

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” Gruber said during a panel discussion at the University of Pennsylvania in October 2013.

“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 to getting the thing to pass.”

Hmmm, where have we heard that “lack of transparency” line before? Oh yeah, on just about everything related to the Obama administration in the past six years — IRS, Benghazi, Bowe Bergdahl, Fast and Furious, Gitmo, immigration reform, wiretapping cellphones, et al.

I guess now we know what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi meant when she said: “We have to pass (Obamacare) so that you can find out what is in it.”

Lack of transparency wasn’t a byproduct of the rushed legislation. It was the plan.

In the aftermath of his statements, Gruber has apologized for his blunt assessment of how Democrats passed Obamacare. But other videos of Gruber insulting Americans and touting Democratic deception have since emerged.

The Democratic establishment has even gone so far as to try to distance President Obama from Gruber, saying he wasn’t the “architect” of Obamacare, he was only a “consultant.”

And Gruber has gone on the offensive, complaining that Republicans are deliberately trying to confuse the issue so as to unwind Obamacare.

He told a Boston television station last week: “I think that it comes to the master strategy of the Republican Party, which is to confuse people enough about the law so that they don’t understand that the subsidies they’re getting is because of the law.”

Does it get any richer than that — Gruber criticizing an alleged strategy that he admits President Obama and Democrats in Congress used in passing Obamacare?

Call me naive, but the voters I know are not as stupid as Democrats think. And I’m 100 percent sure the new Republican Congress won’t find much amusement in Gruber’s sudden reverence for transparency.

Sherman Frederick, former publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and member of the Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame, writes a column for Stephens Media. Read his blog at www.reviewjournal.com/columns-blogs/sherman-frederick