Another large rear-end breaks the Internet

This week. video surfaced of Gruber -- who should be called MacGruber, since he seems to be skilled at blowing himself up -- speaking at an academic conference here in Philadelphia last year. We learned some important things when the video went viral. First of all, apparently you can be a moron and still get a teaching job at MIT. The key soundbite was that  Gruber said that "the stupidity of the American voter" helped the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, become law in 2010. This was, in his opinion, because voters didn't understand that healthy young enrollees would be partially propping up the expansion of health insurance to millions of Americans. He also suggested that the Congressional Budget Office didn't understand the plan well enough to score the personal coverage mandate properly, as a tax.

This is what drives me crazy about the right-wing outrage machine and its constant focus on gaffes. (Liberals, for all their many flaws, focus a lot more on "gaffes" like invading Iraq for no reason or blowing up the world economy in 2008, but I digress...). In this case, though, there could actually be some substance behind the gaffe -- we'll talk about that in a minute. But the real "news" here is still just a gaffe, which may explain why a lot of mainstream news outlets have offered little or no coverage, infuriating conservatives.

If Obama himself had talked about the "stupidity" of the American voters, then maybe there really would be grounds for impeachment after all, -- and if this had been an administration official, he or she should have been fired. But since we're talking about a consultant that you've never heard of before last week, there's really only one issue here, which is: Did he reveal something about Obamacare that was not widely known at the time that Obamacare was passed. And the answer is a resounding "no."

For example:

That concept of healthy people subsidizing the sick was also widely covered in media reports. In a Sep. 29, 2009 story titled, "Age and higher premiums go together," Associated Press reporter Erica Werner explained that the various reform bills making their way through Congress rely on a concept called "community rating," in which insurers would only be allowed to vary premiums by certain factors such as age, geographic area and tobacco use, within certain limits. Tying the rates of younger and healthier people to the rates of older and sicker beneficiaries causes the former to pay more.

This is an issue that was widely discussed by both parties in Congress and brought up publicly by President Obama. It was a feature of the program, not a bug -- understandably an unpopular feature for some -- but it was not hidden from the public...and the bill nonetheless became law. On the other substantive point raised by Gruber, the Congressional Budget Office looked closely at the Obamacare penalties; whether or not it's a "tax" is still debated today, but voters who followed this in 2009-10 knew all about the penalties and knew they'd be administered by the IRS. So what's actually new here, other than an MIT prof thinking we're all "stupid"? Nothing, really.

We're all outraged when a dude, even one we've never heard of, calls us stupid -- but conservatives see this as much more, as ammunition to get rid of Obamacare. Even the guy who does the over-the-top chyrons for CNN probably wouldn't consider that to be "BREAKING NEWS." The 26 Percenters would consider a bad ham sandwich a reason to get rid of Obamacare. In the reality-based world, there's only one reason to trash the Affordable Care Act -- if the program's not working.

Unfortunately for critics of the program, Obamacare is working. The number of Americans without health insurance -- your neighbors, or maybe a family member, who was one diagnosis away from bankruptcy, who might have died from lack of access to a doctor in one of the world's wealthiest countries -- plunged in the first year of the program. As many as 10 million citizens who lacked insurance now have it. What's more, the rate of medical inflation -- i.e., the rate that insurance premiums rise -- has slowed since the Affordable Care Act became law, and the ACA is saving taxpayers money. Yesterday,a new sign-up period began and the technical problems that plaugued the launch of the program last year seem to have been resolved. In fact, new numbers say that 71 percent of people who signed up for Obamacare last year through the exchanges consider their coverage to be "good" or "excellent" -- astounding numbers in an era of government mistrust.

So, yeah, despite all of those thing, we could just toss Obamacare out with the garbage. But unlike Jonathan Gruber, I don't think the American people are that stupid.