ACA: a very important reason Trump got elected

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Call it the Jonathan Gruber election. Gruber is the Ford professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He got his Ph.D. at Harvard. As a White House consultant, he helped to design Obamacare and was then caught afterward on videotape explaining its passage by talking about "the stupidity of the American voter."

Well, if anyone is "stupid" in this story, it's not the voters, but the academics that in their hubris designed an Affordable Care Act that became so unpopular that it became a decisive factor in Hillary Clinton's defeat. These economists and health care experts—Jonathan Gruber and people like him—have fancy graduate degrees, but they designed a law whose results aren't exactly making them or the politicians they advised look like geniuses.

Asra Q. Nomani, a Muslim woman immigrant who voted in Virginia for Donald Trump, explained in a Washington Post column that she did so in part because, "I am a single mother who can't afford health insurance under Obamacare."

A friend of mine reported that while volunteering for the Clinton campaign in Pennsylvania, she encountered one voter who had just gotten off the phone with her health insurance company, "battling an astronomical increase in premiums. A cancer survivor, she had lost her favorite doctor when she went onto Obamacare two years earlier. Now her rates were going up." That voter wound up supporting Trump, too.

A Politico postmortem of the Clinton campaign reported, "The soaring Obamacare premiums announced last month hurt Clinton, some said."

Even Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, conceded in a post-election article: "Americans want reform to Obamacare—?Democrats included. We must bring down the costs of health insurance and the cost of health care."

What was Obamacare, in the end, but an arrogant overreach by an elite out of touch with the rest of America?

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