After Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber's controversial comments about how a lack of transparency and the stupidity of voters helped pass the health care law made national headlines last year, recently revealed comments indicate that he had also suggested that fat people should be taxed based on their body weight.
Gruber, the MIT professor who served as a technical consultant to the Obama administration during Obamacare's design, claimed that it was necessary to tax overweight people by body weight in a bid to fight obesity in the country, The Daily Caller reported.
"Ultimately, what may be needed to address the obesity problem are direct taxes on body weight," Gruber wrote in an essay for the National Institute for Health Care Management in April 2010, just months after helping design Obamacare with the president and during the period in which he was under contract as an Obama administration consultant.
"While it is hard to conceive of this approach being a common public policy tool in the near term, such taxation may be happening indirectly through health insurance surcharges," he wrote. "Currently, employers may charge up to 20 percent higher health insurance premiums for employees who fail to meet certain health-related standards, such as attaining a healthy BMI."
"The new health reform legislation increases this differential to 30 percent, with the possibility of rising to 50 percent. Results of programs that use differential premiums to impose direct financial penalties for obesity will bear watching in the future."
Back in December, Gruber had also admitted of being aware that the Affordable Care Act would prove to be unaffordable for Americans at the time the bill was being created with the White House.
In an October 2009 policy brief, Gruber said that Obamacare had no cost controls in it and would definitely not be affordable for its customers. At the time of the policy brief, Obama had told the American people that their premiums would go down dramatically, after having being personally counseled by Gruber.
"The problem is it starts to go hand in hand with the mandate; you can't mandate insurance that's not affordable. This is going to be a major issue," Gruber admitted in an October 2, 2009 lecture, the transcript of which comprised the policy brief.
"So what's different this time? Why are we closer than we've ever been before? Because there are no cost controls in these proposals. Because this bill's about coverage. Which is good! Why should we hold 48 million uninsured people hostage to the fact that we don't yet know how to control costs in a politically acceptable way? Let's get the people covered and then let's do cost control."
Going a step further, Gruber had stated that effectively denying treatment would be the only way to control costs.
"The real substance of cost control is all about a single thing: telling patients they can't have something they want. It's about telling patients, 'That surgery doesn't do any good, so if you want it you have to pay the full cost.'"
Meanwhile, participation under the Affordable Health Care for America Act (ACA) exchange health plans is being declined by over 214,000 American physicians, according to a survey by Medical Group Management Association, a trade group comprised of multi-physician medical practices.
