Politico reported the other day on another video featuring blabbermouth economist Jonathan Gruber. This one is insulting to Arkansas.
Gruber, one of the designers of the Affordable Care Act, is the MIT-based culprit who said Obamacare was passed in part through deception. Thus he let out a universal truth about American politics.
Most things in American politics are about deception. But you're not supposed to brag about the trick after you've executed it.
The people are not stupid. They are generally uninformed about the detailed substance of issues. So the politicians say a lot of hooey and the people make the best superficial assessments they can fashion.
The politicians are relying on a desired general end justifying their specific occasional means.
We could change this cycle only if the politicians were nobler and trusted people more, or if the people found more time to delve into policy more deeply and demand more of the politicians.
But no one has the time to be, or could possibly be, a master of everything. So we leave the plumbing to the plumbers and the politics to the politicians, all the while pursuing our own areas of expertise that likely remain a mystery to plumbers and politicians.
If we elected plumbers, we'd probably get those wrong, too.
One reason we like sports so much is that there is an actual empirical score and outcome. 30-0. 17-0.
In this latest unearthed video, Gruber pooh-poohs as a mathematical impossibility the "Arkansas solution," meaning our private-option alternative for Medicaid expansion.
He was referring to the notion that Arkansas could buy poor people private health insurance on the new exchange and achieve "revenue neutrality" with what simple Medicaid expansion would cost.
We've been down this dead-end lane before.
A few months ago, the Congressional Budget Office said the federal Health and Human Services Department had erred in allowing Arkansas to cook its numbers to achieve this supposed revenue neutrality, a requirement for a waiver to do Medicaid expansion differently.
Arkansas contended that one had to assume that, if we expanded basic Medicaid and sent a new wave of poor folks into doctors' offices, then we'd have to pay doctors a little more under Medicaid to get them to see these patients.
So our neutrality with Medicaid costs was based on projecting higher Medicaid costs.
As I've explained before, this is all a guessing game. If Arkansas got into the federal government's pocket a bit, then good for Arkansas. If every state did the same, then the federal government might be paying a little more, but the product would be improved.
What in the world would be wrong with that?
You'd have more people with health insurance. You'd have hospitals more efficiently reimbursed. You'd have millions more subsidized customers of private health insurance. Thus you'd have more private competition. Everyone's rates would be held down.
I can think of few ways for the federal government to accomplish more.
Politico also reported that the exposure of this latest Gruber video was ill-timed, coming at the very time Arkansas has been taken over by Republicans, many of whom are avowed opponents of the private option.
That's probably not right about the bad timing.
Any hope Gov.-elect Asa Hutchinson has of saving the private option is dependent on ... well, deceiving a bit, recasting the program as a conservative alternative not liked at all by Obamacare liberals like Gruber.
I use the phrase "deceiving a bit," because, actually, the private option is such a splendid blend of liberal and conservative that one can call it either and commit only mild deception. It is a liberal federal expenditure to drive a social solution. And it is adapted by a conservative state to apply conservative principles in hopes of reforming health insurance more broadly.
We could not have the private option without the noble liberal principle of centralized government action and expenditure to expand health insurance.
We could not have the private option without our local adaptations of Medicaid expansion to implement it in a way that applies new conservative principles.
And we're not going to keep the private option unless we can find a way to make it even more conservative.
The truth of the private option is that it is a stew of polarized ingredients. So in the current climate that feeds off polarization, the private option's political fate will hinge on the effectiveness of an essentially deceptive practice--that of casting it as representing a victory for one philosophy over the other.
In fact, it transcends such things and is victory for both philosophies at a time when neither wants to share.
If Gruber would keep ridiculing the private option ... that would be helpful to essential deceptions in Arkansas.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/25/2014