White House says Gruber's wrong, attacks GOP 
 
 The White House is denouncing comments from key Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber that a lack of transparency and the stupidity of voters helped in the passage of the health care law and is instead pointing a finger at Republicans. 
 
 “The fact of the matter is, the process associated with the writing and passing and implementing of the Affordable Care Act has been extraordinarily transparent,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said during a news briefing in Myanmar, according to a transcript provided by the White House. 
 
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 “I disagree vigorously with that assessment,” Earnest responded when asked about Gruber’s claim that Obamacare wouldn’t have passed if the administration was more transparent and voters more intelligent. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: New video surfaces of Obamacare architect) 
 
 He added, “It is Republicans who have been less than forthright and transparent about what their proposed changes to the Affordable Care Act would do in terms of the choices are available to middle class families.” 
 
 Earnest said the president “is proud of the transparent process that was undertaken to pass that bill into law.” 
 
 The response from the White House comes as a third video of Gruber criticizing the intelligence of American voters has surfaced. 
 
 “We just tax the insurance companies, they pass on higher prices that offsets the tax break we get, it ends up being the same thing. It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter,” Gruber said in remarks from 2012 that aired Wednesday evening on “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.” 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: The selling of Obamacare 2. 0) 
 
 Gruber has been causing headaches for the White House as conservatives have had a field day that began with comments the MIT professor made in 2013. 
 
 “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass,” Gruber said at the time, according to one of the videos that has recently come to light. 
 
 In another video clip of a separate event, while talking about tax credits in the Affordable Care Act, he said, “American voters are too stupid to understand the difference.” 
 
 Gruber apologized for the comments during an appearance earlier this week on MSNBC’s “Ronan Farrow Daily”: 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Ted Cruz out on a limb on Obamacare repeal) 
 
 “I was speaking off the cuff, and I was basically speaking inappropriately, and I regret having made those comments.” 
 
 Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi dismissed Gruber’s role in Obamacare on Thursday, telling the press, “I don’t know who he is. He didn’t help write our bill.” 
 
 Many outlets were quick to point out that Pelosi cited Gruber in a “Health Insurance Reform Mythbuster” on her official website in 2009. 
 
 House Speaker John Boehner released a statement Thursday, slamming Gruber for his comments. 
 
 “If there was ever any doubt that ObamaCare was rammed through Congress with a heavy dose of arrogance, duplicity, and contempt for the will of the American people, recent comments by one of the law’s chief architects, Jonathan Gruber, put that to rest,” the top Republican said. 
 
 The statement continues, “The American people are anything but ‘stupid.’ They’re the ones bearing the consequences of the president’s health care law and, unsurprisingly, they continue to oppose it.” 
 
 Follow @politico ||||| I’ve been trying to figure out why the mainstream media has all but decided to ignore one of ObamaCare’s chief architects saying the administration played on the public’s stupidity in passing the law. 
 
 After all, the press usually loves when hidden video surfaces, as it did this week with MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, and we get unvarnished comments showing what someone really and truly believes. 
 
 And yet there hasn’t been a mention on the network evening newscasts. CNN's Jake Tapper, to his credit, played the clip twice, asked two senators about it and wrote an online column on the subject, but that was about it for the network. Nothing in the Washington Post but for a couple of online items. (Update: The Washington Post finally got around to covering the controversy today, three days after it broke.) Not a word in the New York Times, which in 2012 ran a puffy profile of Gruber (“It is his research that convinced the Obama administration that health care reform could not work without requiring everyone to buy insurance”). 
 
 This is utterly inexplicable, except as a matter of bias. No matter what you think of ObamaCare, on what planet is this not news? Maybe on that comet where the spaceship just landed. 
 
 I tried to think of the possible excuses. Too busy covering other stories? Hey, nobody in America has Ebola anymore! The only real competition is a big winter storm and Eminem disgustingly dropping F-bombs at HBO’s Veterans Day concert. 
 
 Was Gruber’s point about health care taxes and mandates too complicated? Then explain it. Besides, it isn't that this argument never came up before; it's that Gruber fesses up to the attempt at deception. 
 
 Even MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, who makes no secret of being a liberal, admitted yesterday that “had it been a Republican, the media would have been exploding.” 
 
 And yet MSNBC’s coverage in the previous two days basically consisted of Ronan Farrow doing a softball sitdown with Gruber. Now I’ve tried to avoid taking cheap shots at Farrow, a guy with zero journalistic experience, who worked for the administration, and who’s basically on the air because he’s Mia Farrow’s son (and maybe Frank Sinatra’s son). But this was a farce. 
 
 “I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately, and I regret having made those comments,” Gruber said. 
 
 Did Farrow ask what was inappropriate? Did he ask whether the comments were true? Nope, he carried the professor’s water: 
 
 “But the point you were making underneath the choice of words was actually quite nuanced. You were saying, correct me if I’m wrong, that due to political pressure the language of ObamaCare had to be somewhat opaque.” 
 
 Somewhat opaque, I love that. Also known as being highly misleading and pulling the wool over people’s eyes. 
 
 Let’s review: Gruber, a highly paid administration consultant, said this at an academic conference a year ago: 
 
 “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes…Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.” 
 
 Stupidity. Really critical. And where is the rest of the press? 
 
 Now Fox has certainly given the story heavy rotation, and conservatives on the network and elsewhere have jumped on the tape, and a second one that soon surfaced, to discredit the Affordable Care Act. Gruber’s comments don’t prove that the program is a mess or isn’t working. They show that the administration was counting on public ignorance to pass it. 
 
 In another interview, on Boston’s WGBH, Gruber didn’t argue with host Emily Rooney’s characterization that he had admitted to “intentional obfuscation.” In fact, he’s not really taking back what he said at all. He said he didn’t want it widely known that “we gave poor people money.” Gruber then pivoted to charge that “the master strategy of the Republican Party” is “to confuse people enough about the law so that they don’t understand that the subsidies they’re getting is because of the law.” 
 
 That’s a separate debate, but it’s kind of ironic that a guy who pleaded guilty to intentional deception is now accusing the other side of spreading confusion. 
 
 All this would seem to be a ripe subject for public debate. But in much of the mainstream media, it’s been blacked out. And that's downright embarrassing. 
 
 Click for more from Media Buzz. ||||| Story highlights A series of videos featuring statements by an Obamacare architect have incited a furor among conservatives 
 
 In the videos, MIT professor Jonathan Gruber suggested Obamacare supporters were over-emphasizing the benefits of the health care law. 
 
 As Congress voted on the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, in 2010, one of the bill's architects, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber , told a college audience that those pushing the legislation pitched it as a bill that would control spiraling health care costs even though most of the bill was focused on something else and there was no guarantee the bill would actually bend the cost curve. 
 
 In recent days, the past comments of Gruber -- who in this 2010 speech notes that he "helped write the federal bill" and "was a paid consultant to the Obama administration to help develop the technical details as well" -- have been given renewed attention. In previously posted but recently noticed speeches, Gruber discusses how those pushing the bill took part in an "exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter," taking advantage of voters' "stupidity" to create a law that would ultimately be good for them. 
 
 In this fourth video, Gruber's language is not as stark as in three previous instances, but his suggestion that Obamacare proponents engaged in less-than-honest salesmanship remains. 
 
 "Barack Obama's not a stupid man, okay?" Gruber said in his remarks at the College of the Holy Cross on March 11, 2010. "He knew when he was running for president that quite frankly the American public doesn't actually care that much about the uninsured....What the American public cares about is costs. And that's why even though the bill that they made is 90% health insurance coverage and 10% about cost control, all you ever hear people talk about is cost control. How it's going to lower the cost of health care, that's all they talk about. Why? Because that's what people want to hear about because a majority of American care about health care costs." 
 
 Gruber said the measures in the bill that attempt to lower costs constitute a "spaghetti approach" -- throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. And while preferable to the status quo, Gruber said he could offer no guarantee that any of the measures would work. 
 
 "The only way we're going to stop our country from being a latter day Roman Empire and falling under its own weight is getting control of the growth rate of health care costs," he said. "The problem is we don't know how." Experts "know what the problem is," he said. "Our providers are paid enormously high. In the 1950s surgeons are middle class guys like professors...Now they live on the Hamptons, the Cape, they're like investment bankers. 
 
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 Gruber said attempts to control costs in a real way were politically untenable. "The problem is if we just say, 'Look, let's just cut our spending,' well, the problem is you're going to then eat into what the rich guys are getting that they're liking. And that doesn't go so well. That's going to be pretty hard politically. That's why no one has a politically feasible way right now to bend the cost curve, it just doesn't exist." Politicians could suggest capping costs but "you wouldn't win many elections." 
 
 The emergence of this videos from an important crafter of the legislation, repeatedly suggesting that "stupid" voters were misled for their own good by Obamacare supporters, is a potential political problem for the president. He now faces a Congress completely controlled by Republicans, determined to chip away at if not completely overturn the health care law. He also faces another U.S. Supreme Court case on the matter; Supreme Court Justices will assuredly be made aware of the Gruber comments one way or another. 
 
 Asked about Gruber's comments from a 2013 University of Pennsylvania panel in which the economist said "a lack of transparency was a huge political advantage for the President..." in selling the bill to the American people, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said "the process associated with writing and passing and implementing the Affordable Care Act has been extraordinarily transparent." 
 
 Earnest insisted "it is Republicans who have been less than forthright and transparent about what their proposed changes to the Affordable Care Act would do in terms of the choices that are available to middle-class families. I know there is at least one very prominent Republican who campaigned for reelection saying that he would repeal the Affordable Care Act, but yet keep in place the Affordable Care Act marketplace that has operated very successfully in his state." 
 
 Asked about Gruber's reference to the "stupidity of the American voter," Earnest said, "I disagree vigorously with that assessment." 
 
 Gruber declined to comment to CNN. 
 
 JUST WATCHED MIT Prof.: Romney wrong on health care Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH MIT Prof.: Romney wrong on health care 05:14 
 
 On Thursday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was asked about Gruber's remarks. "I don't know who he is," she said. "He didn't help write our bill." A Washington Post story noted that Pelosi in 2009 cited Gruber's work approvingly. 
 
 The Obama administration in recent days has suggested that efforts to bend the cost curve have been working. "Since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, there is evidence that we have bent the cost curve when it comes to health care," the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Sylvia Matthews Burwell, said in September. "Across the board, we have now held down health care price inflation to the lowest rate in 50 years." 
 
 As Sophie Novack noted earlier this year in National Journal, the slowdown in the growth of health care costs is indeed "promising, but analysts remain split over what accounts for the change—and, consequently, how long it will be sustained. The more pessimistic view is that the lower cost growth is a result of the recession and will inflate again as the economy recovers." 
 
 A 2013 Kaiser Foundation study concluded that the struggling economy was responsible for 77% of the slowed growth, "that the economy, including factors such as Gross Domestic Product growth and inflation, produces a major but delayed effect on the nation's health spending. This effect stretches over a period of six years, meaning that the recession that ended in 2009 will continue to dampen health care spending for several more years and that spending will increase gradually as the economy strengthens." 
 
 At a press conference in 2010, President Obama told this reporter that "bending the cost curve on health care is hard to do. I said at the time, it wasn't going to happen tomorrow, it wasn't going to happen next year. It took us decades to get into a position where our health care costs were going up 6, 7, 10 percent a year. And so our goal is to slowly bring down those costs," he said. 
 
 Obama added, "as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins, that's going to increase our costs, we knew that. We didn't think that we were going to cover 30 million people for free, but that the long-term trend in terms of how much the average family is going to be paying for health insurance is going to be improved as a consequence of health care." 
 
 The first few Gruber videos to get any media attention were documented over the course of the last year by Rich Weinstein, an investment adviser who became interested in the origins of the law after the price of insurance for his family doubled.
– The name Jonathan Gruber should be a lot more familiar than it is right now, writes media critic Howard Kurtz. He's referring to the MIT professor and ObamaCare architect who suggested in a recently surfaced video from 2013 that the "stupidity of the American voter" helped get the law passed. First, the offending quote from Gruber: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass." In a column at Fox News, Kurtz blasts mainstream media outlets, which usually salivate over a good hidden-video story, for ignoring this one. "This is utterly inexplicable, except as a matter of bias," he writes. "No matter what you think of ObamaCare, on what planet is this not news?" The story is getting harder to ignore, however: Gruber has conceded to MSNBC that he "spoke inappropriately," the White House today denounced the comments, and yet another video (the fourth, actually) has surfaced. In this one, Gruber is quoted as saying that President Obama "knew when he was running for president that quite frankly the American public doesn't actually care that much about the uninsured.” That's why even though the bill is "90% health insurance coverage and 10% about cost control, all you ever hear people talk about is cost control." This one is being reported by CNN, the very definition of mainstream media. Kurtz hopes the issue finally gets a "public debate," because the coverage so far has been "downright embarrassing." Read his full column.