President Barack Obama finally weighed in on the health care controversy after the architect of the Affordable Care Act said they were able to pass it thanks to the “stupidity of the American voter.”

He distanced himself from economist Jonathan Gruber after it surfaced that he made comments in 2013 at an academic conference that suggested voters would never agreed to a bill that couched the individual mandate as a tax increase, even though that’s what it was. Obama told reporters at a press conference in Australia that there was no deception in the designing or passing of the act, often called “Obamacare.”

The bill was analyzed and debated before passage in 2010, Obama said. He couched Gruber as a man who never worked on the president’s staff who expressed an option “that I completely disagree with.” The comments became public in the midst of President Obama’s week-long trip to Asia, according to the Washington Post.

Gruber, an MIT economics professor, was not actually a staffer for Obama but was a paid consultant who is often credited as the “architect” of the bill. The comments were widely circulated, especially by conservative media outlets seizing on it as proof of deception by Democrats on the bill. The GOP is likely to use it in a new effort to dismantled the act, now that the party has seized control of Congress. Gruber himself may testify in new hearings.

Obama said people who doubt the administration’s authenticity on the act should “go back and pull up every clip and every story” to see the year-long debate policymakers had.

“It’s fair to say there is not a provision in the health-care law that was not extensively debated and was not fully transparent,” he said.

So far, millions of Americans have enrolled under ACA. And just this weekend, the government announced that 100,000 people submitted applications for ACA coverage on the first day of the law’s second enrollment period.