Suppose that Congress decides that everyone in America should have an iPhone. There are two ways it can do this:

1) The government could allocate money to buy all Americans iPhones.

2) The government could require that everybody buy an iPhone but create a tax credit equivalent to the price of the phone.

To an economist, these things are pretty much identical. To a politician, they are very different. The first is a big-spending government giveaway. The second is a tax cut. And in that distinction lies the heart of the firestorm around comments by one of the intellectual godfathers of President Obama’s health reform law.

That would be Jonathan Gruber, an M.I.T. health economist who helped design the Massachusetts health reforms on which Obamacare was based and then advised the Obama administration on that program’s design. At an academic panel in 2013, he said that “this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure” the Congressional Budget Office “did not score the mandate as taxes.” He also said that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” and added, "Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

It looks like a shocking instance of a onetime Obama adviser saying that the administration pulled the wool over America’s eyes in advancing major legislation. That is certainly how many conservatives are interpreting it after a video of the remarks started circulating this week.