'Grubergate' Videos Have Republicans Screaming For Repealing Of Obamacare
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Support for Obamacare continues to slide.
A new Gallup poll shows 56 percent of Americans disapprove of the Affordable Care Act. Only 37 percent approve of the healthcare law.
However, most Americans getting coverage under Obamacare plan to renew their policies.
Meanwhile, word of stunning statements made by a major architect of the plan has Republicans vowing to repeal it, CBS2's Marcia Kramer reported Tuesday.
Thanks to videos showing one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act saying deception helped win the bill's passage, top Republicans now want all or part of the law repealed.
"They wanted to pass the bill by lying to the American people. It basically makes the entire process a fraud," Long Island Rep. Peter King said.
Congressman King was talking about something now known in Washington as "Grubergate" -- videos of MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber admitting deception helped win passage.
"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 to getting things passed," Gruber says on a video.
The tapes are such a political hot potato President Barack Obama tried to distance himself. At least until a tape surfaced of then-Sen. Obama bragging about where he got his health care proposals.
"Many of them I've stolen ideas from liberally, people ranging from Robert Gordon, to Austan Goolsbee, Jon Gruber," Obama says on a video from 2006.
"Grubergate" has started a new partisan food fight over the need to redo Obamacare.
"We have a president who stole his ideas from Gruber and Gruber said the American people are stupid, so where does that leave President Obama? It means that his Obamacare, itself, is a total fraud and that's why we have to begin repealing it," Rep. King said.
"People are understandably pretty tired of re-litigating all of the political fights from 2009 and 2010 as it relates to the Affordable Care Act," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said in response.
But health care experts say there are parts of Obamacare that should be repealed because lies were told.
"There was a deliberate attempt here to game the system, smoke and mirrors on the budget, an unprecedented gaming of the process," Manhattan Institute Director Paul Howard said.
Howard and other experts say Congress should start by repealing the tax on medical devices and ending employer mandates that require paid insurance for part-time employees who work 30 hours a week, Kramer reported.
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