Originally Posted By: HerrStig
Originally Posted By: WillsYoda
1. He is not a Berkeley prof. He isn't even a prof anymore. He is a
former Diablo Valley College professor.
2. Educators by and large are good people who work day and night to help our kids thrive.
It pains me when people disparage educators as a group. I've known many who are living saints.
"Professor" Gruber comes to mind.
Gruber did what many policy people have said in both the GOP and the democratic party: that voters are uninformed and to pass policies in Congress you need to slip things by. Gruber is famous for saying what everyone knows: that good policy needs to trick some voters. So he brags that the Cadillac tax on the richest Americans' healthcare (a tax that pays for working class people's healthcare) is a kind of trick that ultimately helps people get health insurance...
Quote:
In a new video that surfaced Friday, Gruber explains that the Obama administration passed the so-called “Cadillac tax” on high-value employer health plans “by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we know it’s a tax on people who hold these insurance plans.” Americans would not support a tax on individuals, so “We just tax the insurance companies, they pass on the higher prices . . . it ends up being the same thing.” The ruse, Gruber says, was “a very clever . . . basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.”
In another video, Gruber boasts about how the Obama administration fooled Americans into paying to cover the uninsured by using sleight of hand, focusing on their concern over rising health costs. “Barack Obama’s not a stupid man, okay? He knew when he was running for president that quite frankly the American public doesn’t actually care that much about the uninsured. . . . What the American public cares about is costs. And that’s why even though the bill that they made is 90 percent health insurance coverage and 10 percent about cost control, all you ever hear people talk about is cost control.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/...3340_story.html
I would argue that this "90% more coverage and 10% cost controls" was still a significant improvement over the old health care system, which let many families down.