Before there was Gruber, there was Stupak
President Obama’s national health care law was passed more than four years ago, but Americans have learned quite a bit about it in recent days. Its chief architect, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, helpfully outlined on video some of the important budgetary and rhetorical deceptions that were necessary to pass the law, noting that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” and that he and his fellow drafters relied in large part on “the stupidity of the American voter.”
His comments, made over the past three years but discovered online only now, vindicate much of the conservative criticism that was leveled at the Obamacare bill when Congress considered it and the process by which it passed.
But one deception Gruber never directly addressed was the final, critical lie that sealed the deal and allowed Obamacare to pass the House in 2010.
At that time, Bart Stupak, D-Mich., led a bloc of pro-life Democrats in the House who represented relatively conservative districts in the Midwest. This handful of Democrats resisted the law for a time on grounds that they believed it would lead to government funding of abortion. Stupak even presented an amendment to prevent this from happening. But because of the complicated legislative situation Democrats faced after they lost their Senate supermajority in January 2010, passage of the amendment would have meant the death of Obamacare.
And so President Obama applied pressure to the members in question. Nearly all of them ultimately submitted to his will after he placated them with an executive order that let them save face but which was widely acknowledged by all sides of the debate as being completely meaningless.
After betraying the principles he had been standing up for, Stupak actually went to the House floor and absurdly argued against his own amendment when Republicans tried (unsuccessfully) to pass it.
The final Obamacare lie about abortion was partially exposed this September, when the Government Accountability Office produced a report showing that over 1,000 of the subsidized healthcare plans available on government exchanges covered elective abortions, and most consumers would have no way of identifying the ones that did not.
GAO has not yet studied the plans for 2015, but two pro-life groups — the Family Research Council and the Charlotte Lozier Institute — found that the number of abortion-free insurance plans is falling and the number that cover abortion is increasing further still. Abortion coverage is being subsidized now in 26 states and the District of Columbia. As Gruber noted in another context, Obamacare’s lack of transparency was its authors’ greatest asset. In this case, the opacity of the process had helped Obama make yet another unequivocal and clearly false promise about his healthcare law: “Under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortion.”
When he was elected, Obama ordered his administration to err on the side of transparency and promised the most transparent administration in history. He also suggested, as a candidate, that C-SPAN cameras should be present and rolling when the bill’s details were hashed out.
Of course, this did not happen. Obamacare never would have passed if it had.
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