Howard Dean: Obamacare put together by ‘elitists’ who don’t understand the American people

Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said Wednesday that Obamacare was put together by “elitists” who don’t understand the American people.

Mr. Dean was responding to recently-publicized remarks by one of the law’s architects talking about how a lack of transparency and the “stupidity” of the American people helped pass the law.

“The problem is not that he said it. The problem is that he thinks it. I’m serious. The core problem under the damn law is that it was put together by a bunch of elitists who don’t really fundamentally understand the American people. That’s what the problem is,” Mr. Dean said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

In remarks made last year that have recently surfaced online, MIT professor Jonathan Gruber said the bill was written in a “tortured” way to ensure the Congressional Budget Office didn’t score the law’s individual mandate as a tax, though the Supreme Court ultimately upheld the mandate as constitutional under Congress’s taxing power anyway.

“If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. OK, so it’s written to do that,” Mr. Gruber said.

“In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said healthy people are going to pay in — you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money — it would not have passed,” Mr. Gruber continued. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to get the thing to pass.”

Mr. Gruber walked back those remarks on Tuesday, though more videos of the professor expounding on the law are now surfacing.

Republicans are pouncing on the remarks as fresh ammunition against the law. Sen. John Barrasso, Wyoming Republican, on Wednesday called them “very offensive.”

“It confirms people’s greatest fear about the government,” Mr. Barrasso said on “Fox and Friends.” “We knew it was written in a way that was really deliberately written to deceive the American people. And now people are paying the price.”