Thread by @phillyrich1

Obamacare: An interview with myself
phillymag.com/news/2014/11/1…

Rich, Jonathan Gruber came out of his hole, scaring people abt Obamacare being repealed due to being Unconstitutional & people losing their protections. Any comments?

About Gruber personally, no But he’s clearly back to his old scare mongering, word games again.

Here's the video of Gruber just yesterday being his same old Grubering self. msn.com/en-us/video/do…

Rich, Gruber seems to mock anything the GOP does/suggests with regard to healthcare. What was the GOP plan to repeal & replace that failed to pass through Congress?

Essentially, the GOP wanted to repeal Obamacare and block grant the money to the States to do whatever they want.

Wouldn’t that plan cause 14m people to lose their plans?

That’s what the CBO said. But the CBO was wrong.

So you know more about this than Gruber & the CBO?

Yes. And no. According to Mark Pauly, the actual Father of the Individual Mandate (NOT HERITAGE!), the CBO has built into their modeling the premise that you can only achieve universal coverage through a mandate or single payer.

How could you possibly know this?

Easy. Ezra Klein interviewed Pauly about this in 2011. Read it for yourself.
voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/201…

However, the mandate was effectively repealed last year, & there was no drop-off of 14m people. So the CBO was clearly wrong & Pauly was right. Since there is effectively no individual mandate that would be repealed this time around, the GOP plan can be resurrected as-was.

The CBO would score it much differently this time. Notice in the video above Gruber doesn’t not talk about 14m losing their plans. That’s because he knows the CBO modeling- modeling he help build- has been proven wrong.

Remember, the 14m losing their plans was a massive talking point of Obamacare proponents and was basically the issue that caused John McCain to vote against his own party. The media should now be sure to make this issue clear to the public.

Why are people like Jonathan Gruber so afraid of the ACA being found unconstitutional?

Actually, I’m not sure. Other than ego, it makes no sense. He should like the idea of money being block granted to the States. That’s in fact what Romneycare was.

Wait, what? Romneycare was paid for by the Feds?

Yes. According to Gruber himself, its one of Romneycare’s dirty little secrets. They didn’t have to raise taxes to implement Romneycare. They had a block grant from the Bush Admin to pay for it. grabien.com/story.php?id=1…

As Gruber tells the story, many other states wanted to implement Romneycare, but once they found out how it was paid for, they realized they didn’t have that funding. If the ACA is replaced with the block grant concept, they will now have their funding. pbs.org/wgbh/pages/fro…

You said the Feds paying for Romney care was “one of Romneycare’s dirty little secrets.” There’s more?

Yes. The other secret is that Massachusetts and other states created their own death spiral in their insurance markets creating the need for Romneycare.

How?

They 1st legislated “guaranteed issue,” which didn’t allow insurance companies to exclude anyone. Sick people who were out of the insurance marketplace were brought back in. But that made premiums jump. So healthy people bailed out, which caused premiums to jump even more.

This repeated year after year, causing a slow motion train wreck known as a death spiral, leaving basically an insurance market of sick people with healthy people that used to have coverage and wanted coverage on the outside. This actually happened in 7-8 states.

Romneycare repaired this defect by bringing the healthy back into the marketplace, the exact opposite of Obamacare, which brought sick people into the marketplace. Where Romneycare lowered previously inflated rates in a defective market, Obamacare did the exact opposite.

Is there another Romneycare dirty little secret?

Yes. Romneycare has always been sold to the public as a “3-legged stool.” That’s false. It’s a “4-legged stool.” Leg 4 is financing. Without the Federal funding, Romneycare would not have taken place.

So this is all very interesting, but what’s the solution?

Well, Romneycare maybe- times 50. If the reason other states couldn’t do Romneycare was bc they didn’t have Fed $, and now the Feds want to block grant the funding, each state can have their own Romneycare.

So why all the arguments abt people losing their plans if Obamacare is repealed?

Because its impossible for the CBO to model what 50 states will do with their block grants. Will they do Romneycare? Will they try something different? Nobody knows for sure.

So if Obamacare is struck down by the Courts as Unconstitutional, should people be afraid of losing their plans?

No. No. Absolutely no. What they should do is get to work in their own states and put into law something that makes sense for their particular states.

This is really the crux of the debate. Conservatives don’t care what each state decides to do, as long as each state gets to decide on their own w/out Fed interference. If Romneycare is so great, they can do that. Single payer? Sure, let them try. High risk pools? Have at it.