Obamacare Was Built on a Lie

The Big Lie

President Obama said "I will not sign a bill that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future." Democrats claimed it scored as reducing the debt by $131 billion.

Exposing the Lies

"Hiding spending does not reduce spending." Congressman Paul Ryan dissects the bill and exposes the gimmicks that hide the deficits built into the Affordable Care Act. Among those are;

• The bill has 10 years of tax increases and Medicaid cuts to fund 6 years of benefits
• The bill double counts $52 billion of Social Security payroll revenues as increases to Social Security and as health care savings
• The bill counts $72 billion of "savings" from what are premium increases to pay for future benefits
• Nearly $500 billion in Medicare cuts are counted twice. Once to extend the life of Medicare and once to reduce the cost of the deficit
• The chief Medicare actuary says up to 20% of Medicare providers may go bankrupt or be forced to stop taking Medicare patients
• Stripping out the gimmicks exposes a $460 billion deficit in the first 10 years, not a $131 billion surplus
• The second 10 year cost of the bill has a $1.4 trillion deficit
• Stripping the "Doc Fix" out of the bill and dealing with it as a stand alone is a gimmick that creates another false savings of $371 billion
• The bill does not reduce the underlying cost of health care. The president's chief actuary of Medicare says the ACA will bend the cost curve up $222 billion adding to the deficit
• Ignoring these costs does not remove them from the backs of taxpayers.

Congressman Ryan then says, "There really is a difference between us … We don't think the government should be in control of all of this. We want people to be in control."

Ryan ends by saying "What we simply want to do is to start over, work on a clean sheet of paper, move through these issues step by step and fix them and bring down healthcare costs and not raise them."

Obamacare Architect Admits the Lies

Obamacare architect and consultant Jonathan Gruber (who had two contracts with HHS totaling $392,600) says the Affordable Care Act was written in a way to deceive voters or it wouldn't have passed. Here is the text of his comments from the Annual Health Economics Conference hosted by the University of Pennsylvania on October 17th & 18th, 2013.

"It's just, you can't do it politically, you just literally cannot do it. Okay, transparent financing … this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies … lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass."

Another gimmick built into the bill was that only people in states that set up their own health care exchanges could receive subsidies. Dr. Gruber, speaking January 10, 2012 at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, stated that insurance subsidies are tied to state-based exchanges:

"… if your governor doesn't set up an exchange, you're losing hundreds of millions of dollars of tax credits to be delivered to your citizens."

Dr. Gruber spoke to the Noblis Technologies speaker series on January 18, 2012. He was unequivocal in saying that subsidies are only available to those people who live in states that set up state exchanges and are not available to people who live in states with the Federal exchange:

"… if you're a state and you don't set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits. But your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you're essentially saying to your citizens that you're going to pay all of the taxes to help all of the other states in the country."

Dr. Gruber spoke to Chris Matthews on July 22, 2014 and claimed that the language that prevented the people in the federal exchange from getting subsidies was a "typo." The "typo" Dr. Gruber refers to is that part of the PPACA (Obamacare) that only authorizes subsidies for the purchase of insurance on an exchange "established by the State under Section 1311." This "typo" appears 9 times in the legislation.

In fact, the answer to Chris Matthews' question is: "Yes, it was a significant policy decision to offer subsidies only to people in state exchanges. The architects of the plan thought that by not offering subsidies to individuals in the federal exchange, it would force the states to set up their own exchanges."

Beyond Gruber: How HHS Flip-Flopped on Federal Exchange Subsidies

Research by Scot R. Vorse of the Competitive Enterprise Institute shows that the Obama administration did not believe that tax credits (subsidies) would be available to people in the federal exchange. A February 2014 congressional investigation found that the IRS initially began developing a rule to make tax credits available only on exchanges established by a state. HHS had a similar understanding of the law — for nearly two years, it developed its HealthCare.gov website without any effort to offer tax credits on the federal exchange.

The subsidies offered under the ACA trigger taxes against employers and individuals under the law's employer and individual mandates. If the subsidies the IRS is issuing in those 36 states are illegal, then the IRS is also illegally subjecting more than 57 million individuals and 250,000 employers to illegal taxes.

King v. Burwell

By next June, the Supreme Court will rule on the issue of Obamacare insurance exchange subsidies in King v. Burwell, a case that could have significant ramifications for the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare supporters have defended the IRS rule on the grounds that the precise statutory language is a mere drafting error and that everyone involved in developing and implementing the ACA understood that subsidies were intended to be available on federal as well as state exchanges. However, a growing body of contemporaneous evidence shows that even many Obama administration officials believed just the opposite.