Posted on 11/15/2014 5:48:59 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
The weeklong #GruberGate, as it has been dubbed on Twitter, comes just as the Massachusetts Health Connector prepares to relaunch its website today for open enrollment after a devastating year that saw residents struggling to sign up for health plans.
Gruber, a Connector board member, told Bay Staters on Thursday to “give us another chance,” but Archambault said the professor is the last thing the embattled panel needs as it seeks credibility.
“It does raise big questions about his ongoing involvement in Massachusetts, sitting on the board,” Archambault said.
Gruber did not return an email seeking comment yesterday and there was no answer at his Massachusetts Institute of Technology office. He has declined multiple requests for interviews this week with the Herald.
Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber — the MIT brainiac caught on video admitting the law’s “lack of transparency” was meant to dupe a gullible American public — could end up becoming Obamacare’s demolition man, with congressional Republicans threatening to hold hearings and experts saying his bombshell comments could impact the Supreme Court case challenging the Affordable Care Act.
“They can subpoena him and call him to testify about the way he used federal money because he got an awful lot of it,” said Dennis Hale, a Boston College political science professor, referring to reports yesterday that Gruber received hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grants to help states implement Obamacare. “If he shows up to testify, it’s going to be pretty ugly.”
“This is the gift that keeps on giving,” Hale said. “If you’re selling a product that people don’t want to buy and then tell them they’re stupid because they don’t want to buy it, you get into trouble.”
Gleeful Republicans, who will dominate the House and Senate come January, have pounced on Gruber’s comments that the Obamacare law “passed because the American voters are too stupid to understand the difference.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told The Washington Post, “We may want to have hearings on this.” And Arizona Sen. John McCain said the controversy “gives us ammunition to make fundamental changes to the law.”
The Gruber firestorm comes just a week after the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case challenging whether states enrolled in the federal HealthCare.gov portal — rather than creating their own exchanges — can dole out Obamacare subsidies.
In the latest video to be released — the fourth this week — Gruber appears to make the case against the subsidies, telling an audience that if states don’t set up their own exchanges, they won’t receive tax credits.
“Justices and their clerks read the news like everybody else does,” said Joshua Archambault, a health care expert at the Pioneer Institute. “I think it will be in the back of their minds.”
In the same video, Gruber bluntly suggests the implementation of Romneycare involved Bay State bureaucrats sneakily plundering from Washington.
“The dirty secret in Massachusetts is the feds pay for our bill,” Gruber said in a Jan. 18, 2012, video. “In Massachusetts, we had a very powerful senator you may know named Ted Kennedy. Ted Kennedy ... and smart people in Massachusetts had basically figured out a way to sort of rip off the feds for about $400 million a year.”
Later in the video, he suggests small-business tax credits — another component of Obamacare — were crafted mainly to duck public criticism.
“That, to be honest, is political,” Gruber said. “You got to say you like small businesses in America or you’re Communist.”
The weeklong #GruberGate, as it has been dubbed on Twitter, comes just as the Massachusetts Health Connector prepares to relaunch its website today for open enrollment after a devastating year that saw residents struggling to sign up for health plans.
Gruber, a Connector board member, told Bay Staters on Thursday to “give us another chance,” but Archambault said the professor is the last thing the embattled panel needs as it seeks credibility.
“It does raise big questions about his ongoing involvement in Massachusetts, sitting on the board,” Archambault said.
Gruber did not return an email seeking comment yesterday and there was no answer at his Massachusetts Institute of Technology office. He has declined multiple requests for interviews this week with the Herald.
"................As Republicans try to dismantle the Affordable Care Act from their new position of power in Congress, Gruber will become an oft-cited Oracle of Obamacare. But he confirms a broader critique conservatives have of the president, which is that he either cynically thinks people can be fooled or he thinks people aren’t smart enough to know what’s good for them. That means we’re likely to hear Gruber’s name in debates over issues like immigration, in which he has played no role at all." -- Six Degrees of Jonathan Gruber - Why the Republicans’ anger over the MIT professor’s statements about Obamacare is politically justified - Slate, Nov. 14, 2014
Come January Goober needs to be the first guest of the Senate and House committee’s.
You (WE) already gave Gruber many thousands of bucks!
Without so much as a thank you, sucker!
The dot have been connected now what will the SCOTUS do?.
“The Marginal Child”
So we want poor women to get as much access to abortion as possible because their children can’t grow up to be enlightened technocrats.
I’m going to do an EBSCOHost search for some other papers. Should be interesting.
Statistics are here:
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/01/07/do-41-of-all-new-york-city-pregnancies-end-in-abortions/
60% of pregnancies in african american mothers in New York end in abortion. Maybe THIS is what Mr. Gruber wants.
My look through EBSCOHost only found about 20 articles - he’s really only written about his healthcare model, maternal support systems, and an interesting article about how church attendance makes your richer.
1. If a State is enrolled in the federal HealthCare.gov portal, the State may dole out subsidies.
2. If a State sets up its own exchange, it also may dole out subsidies.
3. If a State neither enrolls in the federal HealthCare.gov portal, nor sets up its own exchange, it can not dole out subsidies.
Gruber is trying to make an argument that it was not the intent of the Government to withhold subsidies from States that did not set up an exchange, but according to the Oklahoma State General, that is exactly what was intended by the people who constructed the regulations.
"Defendants themselves relied on evidence from Professor Gruber in an attempt to show the supposed “implausibility” of Congress having made something as important as the subsidies hinge on the States’ willingness to establish exchanges. Plainly, this newly-discovered evidence squarely controverts Defendants’ evidence on this point, and establishes that it is far from “implausible” that the drafters or Section 36B intended to withhold tax credits and subsidies from states who declined to set up exchanges in order to place pressure on those states to set up exchanges. To the contrary, it is not only plausible, it now appears to be demonstrably true."
Do I have this right?
Gruber's lifelone 'wisdom':
Easier to cheat on school tests than to study.
More profitable to steal money from 'Mom's purse' than to get a job.
Faster to lie and deceive people than to hammer out differences.
Mrs. Gruber: See a lawyer -- he's taking you.
Gruber's lifelone 'wisdom':
Easier to cheat on school tests than to study.
More profitable to steal money from 'Mom's purse' than to get a job.
Faster to lie and deceive people than to hammer out differences.
ABC, NBC, and CBS covers for liars because they're liars too... know the con... The 'smart' people are crminals...
Mrs. Gruber: See a lawyer -- he's taking you.
are you sure Gruber is male?
> MacGruber !
Fantastic analogy - that name should be stuck to him! Also, I loved that movie.
His videos set the gaydar alarms off immediately.
time for special prosecutor
His remarks had better “derail” Obamacare!
I don’t think they can be called gaffes if he meant to say them. I read that they were part of his standard lecture.
Once a person believes it’s okay to lie—whether they’re some stupid university professor acting on postmodernist tenets, or a undercover government officer, or even Plato himself—they become exactly the thing we see today known as “Jonathan Gruber.”
And to all leftists who might have the ability to pay attention: you are the next victim of your own self destructive ideology.
Tomorrow, top leftist officials could be pointing to David Axelrod as the definition of stupid, just as Axelrod is doing it to Gruber today. It’s because leftism is driven by subjective rather than objective principles.
(It’s obvious to me that Axelrod, in all likelihood, was praising Gruber a few years ago for the same reason he’s criticizing him today.)
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