Why is it so shocking or horrible to Democrats that the President used political tactics
to get the ACA passed? Political tactics that Gruber stupidly exposed?
I can see why the other side is complaining, but why the Dems? It seems that half the time people here are complaining that Obama isn't a master of politics, like LBJ, and the other half they're complaining that he's just a politician.
He, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, and others cooperated to get an ACA bill passed that could make it through Congress. To do that they had to jump through some political hoops. There is nothing unusual or outrageous about this -- except to the hypocrites on the other side of the aisle, and to Dems who don't know how bills routinely get passed.
It is no coincidence that all the hubbub about this and the Supreme Court taking on the ACA subsidy case is happening at the same time. Anyone who thinks otherwise is incredibly naive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/upshot/the-jonathan-gruber-controversy-and-washingtons-dirty-little-secret.html?hpw&rref=upshot&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&abt=0002&abg=1
That would be Jonathan Gruber, an M.I.T. health economist who helped design the Massachusetts health reforms on which Obamacare was based and then advised the Obama administration on that program’s design. At an academic panel in 2013, he said that “this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure” the Congressional Budget Office “did not score the mandate as taxes.” He also said that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” and added, "Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”
SNIP
But here’s the dirty little secret: Mr. Gruber was exposing something sordid yet completely commonplace about how Congress makes policy of all types: Legislators frequently game policy to fit the sometimes arbitrary conventions by which the Congressional Budget Office evaluates laws and the public debates them.
In the case of the Affordable Care Act, that meant structuring the law so that the money Americans must pay the Internal Revenue Service if they fail to obtain health insurance under the law’s mandate is a penalty, not a tax. (The Supreme Court held that, though not a tax, the penalties were constitutional because they were an exercise of Congress’s taxing authority, which is the kind of distinction only a lawyer could come up with). That’s the reason the financial assistance the health law gives people to buy insurance is structured as a tax credit, not a direct payment, which would probably be simpler and more efficient.
And as Sarah Kliff notes at Vox, it is also why the law was structured to expand insurance coverage three years after passage. That way its cost estimate by the C.B.O. was kept under $1 trillion during the first decade after enactment. One trillion was the highest number that Democratic leaders thought was politically feasible.
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