Obama: We didn't deceive anyone to pass Obamacare
By Sara Fischer, CNN
updated 5:56 PM EST, Sun November 16, 2014
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
(CNN) -- President Obama denied an accusation on Sunday that he had misled voters about his signature health care law in order to get it passed in 2010.
"We had a yearlong debate. I mean, go back and look at your stories," Obama told reporters at the G20 summit in Australia Sunday. "The one thing we can't say is that, 'we did not have a lengthy debate about health care in the United states of America' or that it was not adequately covered."
"The fact that some adviser who never worked on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with ... is no reflection on the actual process that was run," Obama said.
The comments the President referred to were made by Jim Gruber, an MIT health care economist, who noted in a 2010 speech that he "helped write the federal bill" and "was a paid consultant to the Obama administration to help develop the technical details as well."
In a series of speeches that have recently regained attention, Gruber says that engineers of the law, including the administration, took advantage of voters' "stupidity" in order to get the measure to pass.
"Lack of transparency is a huge advantage," Gruber said in a panel discussion at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. "And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever. But basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass."
"(I wish) we could make it all transparent. But I'd rather have this law than not," he said.
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Obama: We didn't deceive anyone to pass Obamacare