[Oleg Brutalist]

On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the architects of Obamacare, stated that “There’s a million people” for whom Obamacare premium increases are “going to be severe — or uncomfortable.”

Emanuel said that “most” Americans are not seeing 25% premium increases, because they get subsidies. He added, “[T]here are some relatively simple fixes. One is better social marketing to get young people in. Another is these risk corridors for the insurance companies, so that they can keep premiums lower. Another is to change…how much older people pay versus younger people, to decrease the cost for younger people overall. And the real ultimate test, Jake, is, can we keep healthcare costs low, and then insurance premiums don’t have to go up. And, so far, the ACA has been doing a pretty good job keeping insurance premiums low, and we have to redouble those efforts.”

Emanuel later stated of the rate increase, “There’s a million people for whom this is going to be severe — or uncomfortable. We should be clear, though. There are lots of places where the increases are nowhere near what you are stating. For example, 12 states have increases of 10% or less, including big states like California, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey. Places like New Hampshire, where you ran an ad just a second ago, in fact, the increase is 2%, across the state on average. So, there’s a lot of variability. Arizona is high, but big, big population states are actually much lower. Rates have increased because they have bigger pools, and with bigger pools, the change from year to year is not so much. And I — you know, for a million people we need to find other solutions.”

Emanuel also argued, “In fact, if you look at health insurance premiums from the Bush era, and you graph the line as if it continued, the fact is that premiums have gone substantially down compared to where they would have been under President Bush, if those lines had continued, and people actually have saved. That doesn’t mean the premiums have actually gone down in real dollars, but they’ve gone down compared to what they would have been, and that is a substantial savings. Second of all, many people in the exchanges are actually getting a better deal than they would have, had they tried to get insurance individually.”
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[maz]

No one could have ever predicted that the Affordable Care Act would not make health insurance and healthcare affordable for Americans.

ACA Architect: 'The Stupidity Of The American Voter' Led Us To Hide Obamacare's True Costs From The Public

You’ve got to hand it to MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. The guy dubbed the “Obamacare architect” is a viral YouTube sensation. A few months back, he was caught on tape admitting that Obamacare doesn’t provide subsidies for federally-run insurance exchanges; it’s now the topic of a new case before the Supreme Court. Today, new video surfaced in which Gruber said that “the stupidity of the American voter” made it important for him and Democrats to hide Obamacare’s true costs from the public. “That was really, really critical for the thing to pass,” said Gruber. “But I’d rather have this law than not.” In other words, the ends—imposing Obamacare upon the public—justified the means.

The new Gruber comments come from a panel discussion that he joined on October 17, 2013 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He was joined on the panel by Penn health economist Mark Pauly. Patrick Howley of the Daily Caller was the first journalist to flag Gruber’s remarks, which were unearthed by Rich Weinstein.

In fairness to Gruber, American voters are not the only people whose intelligence he questions; elsewhere in the discussion, he describes New York Sen. Chuck Schumer (D.) as someone who “as far as I can tell, doesn’t understand economics” and calls a staffer for Sen. Olympia Snowe (R., Maine)—presumably William Pewen—an “idiot.”