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MONTPELIER (AP) >> Vermont is applying a fresh round of scrutiny to its contract with Jonathan Gruber, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology health economist who got into hot water for talking about what he called "the stupidity of the American voter." Vermont State Auditor Doug Hoffer has been reviewing the contract under which Gruber got paid $500 an hour and his assistants got $100 per hour. Hoffer said Friday Gruber provided insufficient documentation to support his invoices to the state. Hoffer said officials in Gov. Peter Shumlin's administration had been in close touch with Gruber throughout his work, but that...

Democrats made a strategic mistake by passing the Affordable Care Act, Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the third-ranking member of the Senate Democratic leadership, said Tuesday. Schumer says Democrats “blew the opportunity the American people gave them” in the 2008 elections, a Democratic landslide, by focusing on healthcare reform instead of legislation to boost the middle class. “After passing the stimulus, Democrats should have continued to propose middle class-oriented programs and built on the partial success of the stimulus,” he said. He said the plight of uninsured Americans caused by “unfair insurance company practices” needed not be addressed but it wasn’t...

A consultant considered an architect to the federal health care law who said a “lack of transparency” and “stupidity of the American voter” were critical to getting it passed reportedly received $481,050 from the state of Michigan, and a recently elected state representative said he wants an investigation. Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who created an econometric model intended to project health care spending and costs under different assumptions, along with his team, was granted a $481,050 contract by the state of Michigan, according to the Washington Post. He was paid that to help set up state...

According to government data, the nearly $6 million in confirmed taxpayer dollars that Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber was paid from 2009 to 2014—about $1 million per year—is roughly 24 times the average salary earned by full-time American workers in the same general time frame. The average annual full-time U.S. salary was about $41,600 in those years, which multiplied 24 times is $998,400, or nearly $1 million a year. Gruber, who became famous last week from a video in which he admitted Obamacare was passed due to a “lack of transparency” and “the stupidity of the American voter,” has received at...

Grubergate: The lies are getting pretty thick these days. The president claims that he never misled anyone about ObamaCare and that Jonathan Gruber was just "some adviser." In fact, Gruber was a key player in the deception.

Romneycare signing. Romney praises Gruber's "model" as "essential." Watch the VIDEO. It speaks for itself.

That’s not quite his verbatim quote, but it’s pretty darn close:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO “The problem is it’s a political nightmare, and people say ‘no, you can’t tax my benefits’…so what we did a lot in that room was think a lot about well how could we make this work? … And [Obama] is really a realistic guy. He was like, ‘look, I can’t just do this.’ He said ‘it’s just not going to happen politically. The bill will not pass. How do we manage to get there through phase-ins and other things?’ And we talked about...

MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber’s comments regarding the “stupidity of the American voter” necessitating legislators to craft the Obamacare law in such a way that voters wouldn’t understand its impact, have sparked outrage, mostly from conservatives. But while Americans are focusing on comments that Gruber has now retracted, they should also pay attention to the real misinformation that he has been peddling about the signature health care legislation all along. “He called you stupid,” writes Ron Fournier for National Journal. “He admitted that the White House lied to you. Its officials lied to all of us—Republicans, Democrats, and independents; rich and...

Two well-placed sources on Capitol Hill say that the Congressional Budget Office effectively used Jonathan Gruber’s model to score Obamacare. That model favors government mandates over market competition and claims that essentially the only way to achieve a large reduction in the number of uninsured Americans is to impose an Obamacare-like individual mandate. Moreover, because the model that the CBO used in scoring Obamacare is the same one it uses today, any alternative to Obamacare that doesn’t include an individual mandate — which is to say, any conservative alternative — would be scored by the CBO as falling well short,...

National Institutes of Health paid him $2 million for Medicare consulting Justice Department has added $1.7 million for expert witness testimony Four US states combined to pay him another $1.6 million for advice about health care laws, and contracts for four more states were unavailable If those states followed suit, Gruber's haul would exceed $7.5 million Gruber has become a thorn in Democrats' sides since videos emerged of him candidly discussing how the Obama White House misled Americans to pass the Obamacare law

The United States stands on the verge of the most significant change to our health care system since the 1965 introduction of Medicare. The bill that was passed by the House and a parallel bill before the Senate would cover most uninsured Americans, saving thousands of lives each year and putting an end to our status as the only developed country that places so many of its citizens at risk for medical bankruptcy. Moreover, the bills would accomplish this aim while reducing the federal deficit over the next decade and beyond. They would reform insurance markets, lower administrative costs, increase...

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber may not have been a household name, at least before this week, despite his being described as the “architect” of Obamacare and, previously, Romneycare in Massachusetts. He sparked a furor this week after video surfaced of his talking about the “stupidity” of the American people, among other insults aimed at the voting public. Now Republicans have pounced, inventing a brand-new word: “Grubering.” Here’s what you need to know about Gruber and the controversy that’s still swirling. I've heard the name Jonathan Gruber a lot this week, but what happened and who is he? He’s an MIT...

In a 2011 conversation about the Affordable Care Act, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the law more commonly known as Obamacare, talked about how the bill would get rid of all tax credits for employer-based health insurance through "mislabeling" what the tax is and who it would hit. In recent days, the past comments of Gruber -- who in a 2010 speech noted that he "helped write the federal bill" and "was a paid consultant to the Obama administration to help develop the technical details as well" -- have been given renewed attention.

A new analysis by a leading MIT economist provides new ammunition for Democrats as the Senate begins formally debating the historic health-reform bill being pushed by President Barack Obama. The report concludes that under the Senate’s health-reform bill, Americans buying individual coverage will pay less than they do for today's typical individual market coverage, and would be protected from high out-of-pocket costs. So Democrats will argue that under the Senate bill, Americans would pay less for more. The new document arms Democrats with a response to the contention of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that the bill would mean...

"...The most recent person to distance herself from the embattled MIT economist is Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress, who wrote an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal Thursday claiming that “Mr. Gruber was not, as many claim, the architect of the health-care law.”......... [snip of her denial] [picking up with the facts].....According to Tanden, Gruber provided essential budgetary information that the Congressional Budget Office needed to score the bill. “The most important arbiter of everything was the C.B.O.,” Tanden told The New York Times for a profile of Gruber. “We knew the numbers he...

The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), intends to negotiate with Jonathan Gruber, Ph.D. on a sole sources basis for technical assistance in evaluating options for national healthcare reform. The basis for restricting competition is the authority of 41 USC 253(c)(1) 106-1(b) because there is only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy DHHS requirements. The anticipated contract period will be eight months.

As Congress voted on the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, in 2010, one of the bill's architects, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, told a college audience that those pushing the legislation pitched it as a bill that would control spiraling health care costs even though most of the bill was focused on something else and there was no guarantee the bill would actually bend the cost curve. In recent days, the past comments of Gruber -- who in this 2010 speech notes that he "helped write the federal bill" and "was a paid consultant to the Obama administration to help develop...