Jonathan Gruber Explains What's Different About Obamacare

Note the highlighting in the third paragraph:

You were an architect of Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health programme and an instrumental adviser in the design of the Obama administration’s health reforms. So please settle the question of the year: How similar are they?

They are very, very similar. You can think of the Affordable Care Act as a more ambitious version of the Massachusetts reform. Both reforms have the same core principles: Non-discrimination in insurance markets, health insurance mandates and subsidies so insurance is affordable. In Massachusetts, we stopped there.

The national bill – the Affordable Care Act – has two additional features. One is it’s paid for and two, it takes on cost controls. Romney’s reform was paid for with funding from the federal treasury. The Affordable Care Act is paid for through offsets in the federal budget. And the Affordable Care Act tackles the increase in costs in a serious way, which the Massachusetts bill didn’t do. So you can think of the Affordable Care Act as the Massachusetts bill-plus.

 How to guess your age?  I remember when Republicans paid their debts.