MIT professor Jonathan Gruber served as the key health care consultant to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and even visited Obama’s office to sell the idea of the “individual mandate,” which Obama later championed, according to a 2007 news article.
Gruber, who said Obamacare passed due to the “stupidity of the American voters” and their “lack of economic understanding,” was described by the Washington Post as the Democratic Party’s “most influential health-care expert” who “consulted with the three leading Democratic campaigns about their health plans,” including Barack Obama’s.
He pressured the Obama campaign to support the “individual mandate” he helped developed for Massachusetts’ state-run health care, which forced people to buy insurance or face a penalty.
“Gruber championed this idea in Massachusetts, and … he did the same in Obama’s office, on the phone with [John] Edwards and in conversations with Chris Jennings, Hillary Clinton’s health policy guru,” reporter Perry Bacon Jr. wrote, adding that Gruber had to warm up the Obama campaign to the idea of the mandate.
He told Obama’s advisers that a mandate was necessary.
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