What? Obama outright lied about Obamacare? Astonishing:
At a town hall meeting where he campaigned for health care legislation in 2009, President Barack Obama pledged to voters that he did not want any tax on health insurance plans he perceived as wastefully generous to ever impact average Americans. But in recent comments by one of the men who helped draft the legislation, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, that is not only precisely what will happen — but that was the intention of the tax.
White House officials had no comment, despite repeated requests by CNN.
Here’s Jake Tapper explaining the controversy, with lots of clips of Obama and his people denying what they expressly intended to do:
Tapper’s video embeds a lot of good quotes, but he misses a very important one. Here’s Gruber explaining how Obama was personally involved in designing the tax on health care benefits (the so-called Cadillac tax):
He said ‘it’s just not going to happen politically. The bill will not pass. How do we manage to get there through phase-ins and other things?’ And we talked about it. He was just very interested in that topic.”
Just to be clear, people think the “Cadillac tax” is on high value health care plans. It’s not. The law is designed, deliberately, as Gruber is good enough to explain, to tax all health care benefits eventually.
Gruber says this is good economic policy. I think he’s right, for the most part. Employer-provided health care shouldn’t have a special tax status. It encourages obtaining health insurance from the employer, which insulates people from their health care costs, which results in higher costs. We should tax health care plans, in combination with a tax cut or tax credit so that it’s not a net tax hike.
That, of course, is exactly John McCain’s health care proposal from 2008. The one that was savagely demagogued by Barack Obama. Obama said he opposed taxing health care plans, and McCain was terrible for suggesting such a thing. The man is a liar.
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