Former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who presided over the tumultuous rollout of Obamacare last year, is attempting to minimize the role of program architect Jonathan Gruber in the wake of his comments that the "stupidity" of the American voter was critical to the law's passage.
Although he was hired as a consultant and met with staffers and advisers, Sebelius told
USA Today that he never sat down with her.
"Maybe he was in a large room; he could have been on a phone call. But in terms of small meetings, discussing policy, that never happened," she said.
But the opinions she expressed about the economic judgment of the U.S. public sounded similar to those expressed by Gruber.
"I think one of the things that we have learned with the passage of the law . . . is a lot of Americans have no idea what insurance is about," she said.
In a September 2012 speech at the University of Rhode Island, Gruber said the passage of the "Cadillac tax" (a provision penalizing consumers with the most expensive health insurance) involved "a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter,"
The Daily Caller reported.
Gruber, an MIT economics professor, also said while appearing on an October 2013 panel at the University of Pennsylvania that "the
stupidity of the American voter" was "really, really critical" to getting Congress to enact President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act in 2010.
While couching it in softer terms, Sebelius tried to suggest that Americans' lack of financial "literacy" and not fundamental flaws in the law are responsible for much of the public hostility toward Obamacare.
"I think the financial literacy of a lot of people — particularly people who did not have insurance coverage or whose employers choose their coverage and kind of present it to them — is very low," Sebelius told USA Today. "That has to be a stunning revelation, and it's not because anybody hid it from folks; it's that this is a complicated product."