Obamacare Architect Admits Public Option Was the Pathway to Single Payer
Channel: TheUtahGuru
Date: 2014-07-27

Video surfaced this week of Jonathan Gruber, the #Obamacare “architect,” stating that state exchanges were the only ones set up from the beginning to offer tax credits for their participants, undermining the administration’s position on legal challenges to Obamacare.

But that portion of Gruber’s 2012 speech didn’t contain the only admission that Obamacare supporters probably wish had been kept quiet. Turns out the public option was just a sneaky way to move the U.S. healthcare system to a single-payer model.

Here’s what Gruber also said in his speech to Noblis, 

“So I like the public option. The public option is actually the brainchild of another academic, a guy named Jacob Hacker who’s at Yale. And the public option, basically it was a clever idea. He said look, the left wants single-payer, the right wants competition–how about we have competition where the option is single-payer. It’s kind of a clever way to call both sides bluff. Basically, since it was such a good idea that’s why both sides didn’t like it. Okay, the right didn’t like it because they were afraid that the left was right and the single-payer would work.

The left didn’t like it because they were afraid that the single-payer didn’t have enough teeth to really work. And basically, the public option, to be honest, was never going to happen. The public option was really something that was in there. It was a good idea as a debating point but it just was too radical. Remember, the reason this reform passed, as barely as it did, is because it was not trying to rip up things and start over. It was trying to work incrementally off the existing system. The public option was viewed as too radical.”

Gruber believes that at the time the system he preferred, public option, was viewed as too radical. But the “reformers” were patient enough to pass a good-enough law for now, before going for their true goal when the time is right.

If the court challenges to Obamacare are upheld and the exchange system fails, you can bet the Democrats will attempt to use that as a reason for creating a true single-payer system.

Full Video: http://youtu.be/GtnEmPXEpr0