Obamacare, it turns out, is just another in a long string of big lies from the political left. A huge, complicated fantasy cloaked in gibberish, it is a whopper so enormous, so monstrous it could transform the United States into something unrecognizable if it is not stopped.
Why lie in creating the law? The left -- surprise! -- says it believes you are too stupid to handle the truth; that Obamacare is designed to fail; that it will cost too much; that it is a massive redistribution of wealth from the young to the old; that it is a first, necessary step to the single-payer, socialized health care system of its dreams.
In fact, it fears you are too smart, so the left does what it must to survive -- it lies.
One of the law's key architects, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who also helped in creating Romneycare in Massachusetts, let the cat out of the bag. He says Obamacare is at its core a lie. The Democrats' lapdog media largely ignored this startling slip for days.
At least twice, perhaps more -- on video, no less -- Gruber brazenly told his egghead pals that American voters' "stupidity" made it important to hide key facts about Obamacare, and, he notes smugly, without subterfuge the law would have been toast on arrival.
"... If you had a law which said that 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, okay," Gruber says in a video of an Oct. 17, 2013, panel discussion at the University of Pennsylvania's Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. The video was unearthed by Rich Weinstein, a Philadelphia investment adviser.
"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 for the thing to pass…. Look, I wish ... we could make it all transparent, but I'd rather have this law than not."
There is more. Gruber also says Obamacare's individual mandate -- which orders Americans to buy government-approved insurance, or be fined -- purposefully is described in the law as a "penalty," not a "tax," to hide its true effects. In reality, it was a huge tax increase unlikely to win votes.
"I mean, this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO (the Congressional Budget Office) did not score the mandate as taxes," Gruber said. "If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so (it is) written to do that."
One can only wonder what Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, who ruled the fine is a tax within Congress's tax-writing authority, is thinking, or whether those who claimed to have read the law before voting -- Mark Begich, for instance -- were complicit in the lie.
At another October 2013 event, at Washington University in St. Louis, Gruber again showed his disdain.
Referring to the so-called "Cadillac tax" on premium health insurance plans -- a 40 percent levy on companies rather than on policy-holders, who will end up paying most of the costs anyway -- he said: "They proposed it and that passed, because the American people are too stupid to understand the difference."
If your leftspeak is rusty and you believe Gruber or his Democrat friends actually think you are stupid, let me translate. What he meant was that if you know the truth, you likely would not agree with him and his leftist pals. It is not that you are stupid, it is that you may not be -- and that has them buffaloed.
For his part, Gruber went on the MSNBC's barely-watched Ronan Farrow show -- who is that guy, anyway? -- to say, "I was speaking off the cuff...." Later, he did what these guys do; he attacked Republicans in a "Bush did it" fallback.
Republicans have been circumspect about Gruber's revelations. They must not be. If there ever was a reason for them to quickly curb Obamacare's excesses, fix what they can and later drive a stake through its cold, socialist heart, this is it.
Obamacare is nothing more than a vast, complicated lie designed to irretrievably redefine this nation to its core. Its mortal enemy, as Joseph Goebbels, father of the Big Lie, would say, is the truth.
If nothing else, Gruber -- finally, boastfully, inadvertently -- has given us a glimpse of that.
Paul Jenkins is editor of the AnchorageDailyPlanet.com, a division of Porcaro Communications.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.