Boehner’s office on Obamacare remarks: American people anything but ‘stupid’

The office of House Speaker John A. Boehner is pushing back against recently-unearthed remarks from an MIT professor and architect of President Obama’s health care law in which the professor suggested that a lack of transparency and the “stupidity” of the American voter helped the law pass.

“The American people are anything but ’stupid,’” Mr. Boehner’s office said in a statement Thursday. “They’re the ones bearing the consequences of the president’s health care law and, unsurprisingly, they continue to oppose it.”

The professor, Jonathan Gruber, had 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 — even though the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld the mandate as constitutional under Congress’s taxing power.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Mr. Gruber said last year. “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 said this week he regretted the remarks, and White House spokesman Joshua Earnest said the process associated with writing, passing, and implementing the law has been “extraordinarily transparent.”

Presented with the “stupidity” comments, Mr. Earnest said: “I disagree vigorously with that assessment, I think is what I would say.”

Mr. Earnest also said it was Republicans who have been less than forthright about how changes to the law would affect Americans.

“So I think if we’re going to examine which party, and whether its advocates or opponents who have been honest about the true impact of the law, I think the administration grades out very well on that factor,” he said.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, said Thursday that Mr. Gruber’s comments were a year old and he’s backtracked from most of them.

“I don’t who he is, he didn’t help write our bill,” she said.

Mrs. Pelosi then noted that millions of Americans have obtained health coverage through the law.

“So we’re very, very proud of it,” she said.

• Tom Howell Jr. contributed to this report.