Tuesday, February 08, 2011

ObamaCare: Now In Comic Book Form!

...because we Americans are too f*cking stupid to understand the benevolence being graced upon us by the Democratic party and Fearless Leader, the intellectual elite who brought us such best-sellers as "The Stimulus', "The Reset Button", and "Government Motors", are now giving us health care reform the only way we can comprehend it: In comic book form!
The MIT economics whiz who crafted President Obama’s national health-care overhaul now plans to explain the complex and controversial plan to the masses — in one long comic book.

Unlike most comic books, Gruber’s won’t have a superhero like Batman or Captain America or a villain like the Joker, he said.

“I’m going to use the facts to tell the story,” Gruber, 45, told the Pulse yesterday. “I’m the narrator guiding the reader through the law. It’ll have lots of pictures and text.”

Hill and Wang, a division of publishing powerhouse Farrar, Straus and Giroux, plans to release Gruber’s book, tentatively titled “Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It’s Necessary, How it Works” this fall.

It’s an unusual venture for Gruber, a brilliant Massachusetts Institute of Technology academic and a key architect of Romneycare, who spent much of the last decade telling national leaders why the American health-care system is broken, and how to fix

Now Gruber is breaking down the president’s 2,400-page legislation into illustrated, bite-sized panels for non-wonks who either don’t understand or don’t like the national plan...


Because that's how stupid we are - we need to be force-fed things we don't like in "bite-sized panels", in baby talk ("non-wonks") - with pictures! - to learn to love that which our gut tells us to hate.

Sorry, Gruber, if you were as brilliant as you think you are, you would have come up with a better plan, and would have figured out a way to sell it without insulting our intelligence.

If you are going to write a comic book, though...may I at least suggest a villain?




UPDATE 3-31-2013
It's 13 months later, and it turns out Gruber was wrong. About everything:

Last week, major insurers warned of double-digit premium hikes for small businesses and individuals when Obamacare goes into effect next year. Likewise, the nonpartisan Society of Actuaries this week estimated that costs to insurers that provide coverage to individuals will rise 32 percent on average within the first three years of the law, with premium increases sure to follow.

Similar analyses last year had already forced MIT’s Jonathan Gruber to admit that his projections that the law would lower premiums for young and old alike were wrong — even though his projections were instrumental in securing Obamacare’s passage. Gruber’s revised estimates now show that even the least affected states, such as Colorado, will experience premium hikes of nearly 20 percent by 2016.


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