When it was discovered that Jonathan Gruber, a key ObamaCare architect, had revealed that ObamaCare was intentionally vague in order to mislead the “stupid” American people, President Obama immediately attempted to distance himself from the man. However, evidence continues to indicate that Obama not only borrowed a number of ideas from Gruber, but that it was Gruber who convinced the president to adopt the individual mandate.
Gruber has dominated the headlines in recent days after a video of his appearance on a panel hosted by the Penn Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics on October 17, 2013 was posted only recently. In the video, Gruber, an MIT professor who played a major role in the design for ObamaCare, admitted that the Obama administration’s lack of transparency was necessary in order to get the president’s healthcare law passed, adding that the legislation was written in an intentionally vague manner because of “the stupidity of the American voter.”
Gruber also stated that though the individual mandate was upheld by the Supreme Court because it was perceived as a tax, it is, in fact, not a tax.
Gruber explained, “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.”
On the panel, Gruber asserted, “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 for the thing to pass.”
Gruber outlined exactly what was needed to be done in order for the bill to pass:
In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in — you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.
Gruber added that he wished the law could have been transparent, but that he’d “rather have this law than not.”
Predictably, President Obama and his fellow Democrats attempted to argue that Gruber did not play a significant role in writing ObamaCare. “The fact that some adviser who never worked on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with in terms of the voters is no reflection on the actual process that was run,” Obama said Monday in Australia.
Obama’s remarks are undermined by the release of yet another video, however, featuring Obama admitting that he’s “stolen ideas” from Gruber, rather “liberally.”
In the video, Obama said:
You have already drawn some of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles, many of them I have stolen ideas from liberally, people ranging from Robert Gordon to Austan Goolsbee; Jon Gruber.
And during President Obama’s first campaign in 2006, Gruber reportedly advised Obama, and has visited the White House at least a dozen times since he’s taken office. Furthermore, Gruber received a contract of approximately $400,000 to advise the president on the healthcare law.
Likewise, in 2012, after a debate with Governor Mitt Romney, the Obama campaign produced a press release that labelled Gruber as an architect of ObamaCare. The move was intended to undermine Romney’s anti-ObamaCare statements as Gruber had also worked for the Romney administration, but it is not likely that Obama thought that press release would come back to hurt him years later.
Additionally, Gruber was prominently featured in an Obama campaign commercial in 2012, wherein lines were drawn between Romney’s healthcare plan and Obama’s, as Gruber was the “health consultant” for both.
Further evidence of the significance of Gruber’s role in the crafting of ObamaCare can be found years earlier in his push for the “individual mandate.” In 2008, the New York Times’ Paul Krugman cited Gruber’s analysis of the healthcare reforms proposed by Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards. Obama at the time was an opponent of mandates, which prompted Gruber to determine that Obama’s was the weakest of the reform proposals.
“Mr. Gruber finds that a plan without mandates, broadly resembling the Obama plan, would cover 23 million of those currently uninsured, at a taxpayer cost of $102 billion per year,” Krugman wrote. “An otherwise identical plan with mandates would cover 45 million of the uninsured — essentially everyone — at a taxpayer cost of $124 billion. Over all, the Obama-type plan would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the Clinton-type plan only $2,700…. And that’s why many health care experts like Mr. Gruber strongly support mandates.”
When Obama won the election in 2008, he added Gruber to his transition team. The New York Times would later refer to Gruber as “Mr. Mandate” on Obama’s healthcare team. By July 2009, Obama had changed his mind on the mandate. “It is [Gruber’s] research that convinced the Obama administration that health care reform could not work without requiring everyone to buy insurance,” the Times reported in 2012, at the same time Gruber was publicly hoping the Supreme Court would uphold the constitutionality of the individual mandate.
The intentional political deception that went into the design of ObamaCare, as well as Obama’s recent attempts to deceive the American people about Gruber’s role in the healthcare legislation, has prompted critics to call for a proper investigation.
Republican Senator Rand Paul (Ky.) appeared on Fox News’ Hannity on Monday, stating that the “deceptive and deceitful” actions of those involved in the design of ObamaCare are a “disgrace.”
Paul also added that he intends to ask for an investigation from the investigator general, and insist that Gruber “return his pay”:
There was the public deception by the president and all of his henchmen and women, but also the deception of paid consultants. The one thing we can do is that this Mr. Gruber, this Jonathan Gruber, he was paid and now he’s admitted he was deceptive and deceitful, I’m going to ask for an investigation from the investigator general and ask that he return his pay. Because how can you — how can we pay someone to be a consultant to government who’s frankly admitting they were dishonest? So I think he should be made to return his pay.
Paul also intends to investigate the various payments that Gruber has received from a number of state contracts:
The other thing we ought to investigate is there’s about ten different states where he got between $200,000 and $400,000 for specific reports. Who was sort of organizing this for him? Is this some sort of thing that happened within government? Was he just able to market himself everywhere? Or was this all coming as sort of an organized way to enrich Obama consultants? But this is a disgrace. Now totals are saying as much as $6 million. I think we ought to talk about having him give it back to the taxpayer.
Paul is not alone. Michigan State Representative-elect Gary Glenn said on November 15 that he will formally request the Michigan House of Representatives Research Services Division to investigate and report on why the state of Michigan paid more money to Gruber than any other state.
“Taxpayers and those of us entrusted with spending our tax dollars deserve to know why [Gruber] pocketed more tax money from Michigan than from any other state, even more than the Obama administration itself paid him,” Glenn said. “Why did Michigan taxpayers get [stuck] for nearly half a million dollars paying for Gruber’s propaganda pitch for an ObamaCare state health care exchange, which the Michigan House correctly refused to even set up? And who’s responsible for approving this waste of nearly half a million of our tax dollars to justify implementing ObamaCare in Michigan before it was determined the exchange would ever even exist?”
