"This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. OK? So it's written to do that. 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. OK? 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. Look, I wish ... we could make it all transparent, but I'd rather have this law than not." ... “The only way we could take it on was first by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people when we all know it's really a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.” ... “We just tax the insurance companies, they pass it on in higher prices that offsets the tax break we get. …It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.”
Why is Health Insurance so Expensive in the U.S.?
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