Dumb and dumber

Let’s clear up one point: I’m dumb. Too dense to make sense of the so-called “Affordable Care Act” when it was passed, and too easily intimidated by its 2000-plus pages to actually read the thing. My day job doesn’t leave me enough time to sift through government legalese, but even if I had the time, bureaucratic and financial jargon fries my brain. Members of Congress may have the same excuse, since most of them didn’t read it either.

So Jonathan Gruber, the MIT professor who provided the economic model for Obamacare, may have had people like me in mind when he said Americans were “too stupid” to understand the real intentions of the law. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” he said during a panel discussion last year, adding that transparency is nice when circumstances allow, but, “I’d rather have this law than not.” So ends justify means, and so far, in various on-camera statements, Gruber has admitted to writing the bill “in a tortured way” to obscure the distinction between taxes and penalties, as well as other details that turn out to be pretty significant.

There are different kinds of smart. Washington policy makers seem to buy into the notion that the only real kind of smart is the theoretical kind that looks good in academic journals. The practice of relying on academic advisers to shape policy goes back at least as far as FDR and his Brain Trust, and now permeates the federal bureaucracy. “Experts” have a place in government, but their role in crafting the ACA demonstrates the limits of their usefulness.

Gruber is an intelligent man with excellent qualifications. Even so, something—let’s call it common sense—tells me that a huge unwieldy vehicle glued together by political deals and obfuscations, with too many details left to the discretion of a Cabinet secretary, is not going to prove roadworthy. Sure enough, the wheels started coming off with the website debut, and further revelations and challenges threaten a complete breakdown.

The latest challenge pits the IRS, charged with implementing the law, against the law itself. Federal subsidies for individuals buying health insurance through Obamacare are supposed to be available only through state exchanges. But 36 states declined to set up their own exchanges—for good reason. As Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey put it at the time, “I will not ask New Jerseyans to commit today to a state-based exchange when the federal government cannot tell us what it will cost or how that cost compares to our other options, and how much control they will give the states over this state-financed option.”

Obamacare’s creators expected the states would get on board; when they didn’t, the IRS simply started offering subsidies through the federal exchange, in blatant disregard of statutory authority. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined the IRS was justified in interpreting what has been called a “typo”; the D.C. Circuit disagreed. Now the Supreme Court will have another go at the law’s constitutionality.

The bumpy progress of Obamacare confirms the hunch of many dumb Americans: It’s cumbersome and deceitful, like other “comprehensive” laws passed today. The fact that those responsible for it did not foresee the difficulties indicates how out of touch they are with life in the real world. There are different kinds of smart, and also varieties of stupid.