A nasty little video popped up on Drudge that gives some real insight into what we all already knew: that Obamacare is meant to fleece some to provide free coverage for others a few.  Jonathan Gruber, from MIT, explains that some people, because they’re healthy, have been able to pay less for healthcare. Well, duh.

This law is really leaving those with employer insurance, those with government insurance alone. We’re talking about a small minority of Americans that buy insurance on their own through the individual market.

In other words, the freeloaders can stay as is, and those who have insurance through their job.  It’s “really” leaving those people alone.  (For the record, use of the word “really” as an emphasis can sometimes signify deception as the speaker attempts to convince his listener, but I digress.)

It’s 12 million people, about a third of which will end up paying more under this law…We currently have a highly discriminatory system where if you’re sick, if you’ve been sick or [if] you’re going to get sick, you cannot get health insurance.

Ok, this is a bit misleading.  The point of insurance is to have it before you need it.  You pay for it in the hopes that you don’t ever have to use it, but if you do, it’s there.  That is how insurance works, and it’s how the company can pay out if you actually do find yourself with a major medical situation.  Insurance is NOT meant, however, for you to go without for years, then suddenly say, “Oh, wow, I just found out I have diabetes.  I should go get insurance.”  Obviously this is a fairly simplistic example, but you get the point.  You don’t call up Progressive and say, “Hey, I just rear ended someone.  Can I get a quote?”  This is why 12 million Americans pay for coverage on their own; their jobs don’t offer it or they aren’t eligible for it, so they purchased their own coverage—because you need to have it in case something happens. 

This moron, however, calls it a discriminatory system.  Yes, because it’s discriminatory to tell someone who runs 5K races on the weekend that he can pay less for his insurance than the obese couch potato who smokes and has emphysema.  It’s unfair to tell someone who has AIDS and requires expensive medications and therapies that they must pay more than someone who is not an AIDS patient.  That’s not discriminatory.  It’s called business.  Gruber, however, is about to explain why this is all so terrible.

The only way to end that discriminatory system is to bring everyone into the system and pay one fair price. That means that the genetic winners, the lottery winners who’ve been paying an artificially low price because of this discrimination now will have to pay more in return. And that, by my estimate, is about four million people. In return, we’ll have a fixed system where over 30 million people will now for the first time be able to access fairly price and guaranteed health insurance.

Bring everyone into the system.  He means the people who didn’t carry health insurance because they didn’t “need it,” and now have high-cost care demands that can’t get insured anywhere else.  But those “lottery winners,” those “genetic winners” who have stayed healthy AND maintained their own coverage, those people have been getting charged less!  How very logical.

Language is important.  The words we use say far more than we realize, and Gruber’s statements are no different.  He uses the terms “genetic winners,” and the word “lottery,” because he’s attempting to frame the issue as though the people who are healthy and maintained insurance are simply lucky.  It has nothing to do with healthy lifestyles or responsible behaviors.  It’s just luck.  Conversely (and more importantly), Gruber is saying that those who do not have insurance and now need it for their pre-existing conditions are all victims.  It’s not their fault.  Their behavior-derived medical issues, such as lung cancer, emphysema, COPD, or AIDS-defining illness are just bad things happening randomly to poor people.  That’s like saying every person on food stamps and welfare is a good-hearted person who’s just down on their luck.  What?  People abuse the system so they can continue making poor lifestyle choices?  Say it ain’t so.

Once he frames the debate in terms of medical health being a random thing, he then can justify penalizing those “lottery winners” because it’s not like they earned that low rate through their healthy lifestyles.  Therefore, they shouldn’t get to benefit from it.  You didn’t build that, you know.  They should have to pay more—a “fair price,” where fair is determined by the federal government, who is taking from the healthy and the responsible, and giving to the sick.

Then, Gruber wraps the whole package up in a nice little box.  And now, all these poor, sick, underprivileged people who did not win the health lottery can have insurance…paid for by all those healthy people who were just inconsiderate enough to be so lucky with all those genetics.  Thank God we have such benevolent rulers, that they can even the playing field.