Seeking to discredit a long-accepted insurance concept in which more expensive customers are separated from the regular health insurance market, one of the architects of Obamacare on Monday compared the idea to the establishment of “internment camps.”

Jonathan Gruber, now an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used the incendiary term to describe high-risk insurance pools during an appearance on “CNN Newsroom” with conservative economist Stephen Moore.

“But what if we called it a high-risk internment camp? That would not have the same kind of invocation.”

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“The term ‘high-risk pool’ invokes people splashing around, having fun,” Gruber said. “But what if we called it a high-risk internment camp? That would not have the same kind of invocation. The point is, sure, you could take the sick people out and not cover them and now lower premiums for healthy people. But that’s not insurance.”

CNN anchors John Berman and Poppy Harlow did not bat an eye at Gruber’s hyperbolic comparison — despite the fact that it comes just weeks after White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s clumsy Holocaust reference became a national scandal.

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But they also let Gruber get away with inaccurately describing what a high-risk pool does. They are not designed to pull out sick people and “not cover them,” as Gruber said. Instead, high-risk insurance pools are designed to separate expensive customers from the regular insurance market in order to reduce premiums for everybody else.

There are different models for a high-risk pool. It could be funded by surcharges on insurance companies. It could involve cash transfers from insurers with relatively small numbers of customers with pre-existing conditions to companies with more lopsided customer bases. Or the pools could be subsidized with taxpayer funds.

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A number of states ran high-risk pools before Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, which mandated that insurance companies sell policies to anyone regardless of prior health — and made it illegal to charge them more.

Gruber made the “internment camp” reference for a second time.

“That’s not insurance,” he said. “Insurance covers you when you’re sick. And segregating them in a separate high-risk pool, or internment camp, doesn’t do any good if there’s not the money to make insurance affordable.”

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Moore touted the idea of high-risk pools, which is a feature of the Republican plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He argued that Obamacare turned the concept of insurance on its head. Rather than paying premiums as a hedge against a future medical event, Obamacare lets people wait until they are sick and them sign up for insurance without penalty.

“It’s like saying, you know, somebody’s house is burning down and, therefore, they can run up and get fire-insurance protection,” he said. “What you described is not insurance.”

Gruber is no stranger to controversial statements. During a panel discussion at the University of Pennsylvania in October 2013, he acknowledged that the Affordable Care Act was intentionally written in a “tortured way” to obscure the fact that healthy people subsidize sick people. He referenced “the stupidity of the American voter” and added that the “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.”