Free Republic

A top Obama administration health official considered putting MIT economist Jonathan Gruber to work on Obamacare to be an initiative of such “key political importance” that it was expedited because of “political push” from the Obama administration, emails released by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reveal. The agency released 750 pages of heavily-redacted records on Monday to The Daily Caller and other news outlets in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. In one telling exchange after Gruber’s Obamacare work was first reported in 2010, one HHS analyst told another that having Democrats in charge “across...

Say my name. ---Walter White aka Heisenberg in Breaking Bad.New York Times writer Robert Pear  knows his name but he didn't say it in his article about how four words in the Obamacare law was simply a mistake. Pear quotes a number of people involved in the law's writing process but fails to mention the one who was acknowledged as the architect of Obamacare...until it became politically inconvenient to do so---Jonathan Gruber. And the reason why Gruber's name went unmentioned in the article is because of his claim, recorded for all eternity on video, that only state based health exchanges would...

Hillary Clinton’s rotten, stinking criminal corruption disqualifies her even from a prison work-release job scrubbing toilets at a truckstop. But what difference does it make? She’s running for president again, and this time her campaign says they plan to raise and spend $2.5 billion. That’s 2.5 billion dollars. Billion, with a B. It’s the end of the world as we know it. Who the hell has ever heard of such a thing, spending two and a half billion dollars on one candidate’s presidential campaign? Whatever the racket raised, democrats will eventually have to come to grips with the fact that...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) is the only major Republican likely 2016 presidential candidate who hasn't weighed in on the controversy over Indiana's "religious freedom" law that erupted this week — and his explanation for avoiding the issue is questionable.

Ted Cruz is set to announce is candidacy for President of the United States. Rand Paul is apparently going to announce early next month before going on a campaign tour. Until today technically the only candidate was Jeb Bush, who announced late last year his intentions. At the time everyone thought that Bush was going to force everyone else to declare their candidacy early. It doesn’t appear that has happened, Cruz and Paul have appeared in no rush to make a formal announcement. Scott Walker, perhaps the front runner in the race, still hasn’t formally announced his candidacy and there’s...

Please believe in the integrity of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber. If he disavowed his own remarks emphatically repeated several times on video that only state based health exchanges were eligible for subsidies you can believe this honorable gentleman. Such is the attitude of General Electric Vox's Sarah Kliff as she regales us with the history of the King vs Burwell case which will be heard this week at the Supreme Court. Kliff might be unique as being the last person on the planet to believe in the integrity of Jonathan Gruber. Or is she only faking such a belief to...

Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber billed the State of Vermont for hours that “were impossible for him to accomplish ... for one of the invoices, which is September, and this is just an example, he billed out 500 hours a month for his research assistants. Well, the auditor found that he only had one research assistant. So, if you do that math ... the auditor even criticized the Democrat administration up here for this. The people who were supposed to be overseeing this contract did not demand any details at all from Professor Gruber. They just said — they just asked...

Thanks to some careful research by Matt Palumbo who writes for the Foundation for Economic Education, a series of lies and half-truths being promulgated by Obamacare mouth piece Jonathan Gruber have been uncovered. The first lie cited is the bogus analogy Gruber makes between a mandate forcing Americans to buy Obamacare and one forcing drivers to buy auto insurance. This completely pushes aside the fact that no one is required to drive a car and thus carry auto crash liability insurance. Asserting that the burden to carry Obamacare is no different than the mandate of auto liability insurance is a...

As the SCOTUS oral arguments in King v. Burwell draw near, the cacophony from liberal outlets is nearly deafening. The plaintiffs’ position is “absurd ,” they cry. Congress “never contemplated withholding premium subsidies” in noncooperative states. Even the Obama administration argued that “it would have been perverse for Senators concerned about federalism to insist on pressuring States to participate in the implementation of a federal statute.”[1] Perverse? Jonathan Gruber (whose position on the issue is “complicated”[2]) is equally disdainful, calling the challengers’ stance “nutty,” “stupid,” and a “screwy interpretation” of the law. Really? Were Obamacare architects incapable of using “sticks”...

Last week, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jonathan Gruber, one of prominent architects of Obamacare, was exposed as little more than an elitist fraud. Gruber was caught on videotape expressing the haughty attitude that drove the Affordable Care Act, deriding the "stupidity" of Americans as a way to justify misleading them. Gruber apparently thinks such deception is OK because yokel voters could not handle the truth about the looming chaos he helped to engineer in their health coverage. Unfortunately, Gruber's disdain for the proverbial masses -- he was paid nearly $400,000 in consulting fees -- is thematic of the last...

BRISBANE, Australia — President Barack Obama denied Sunday that his signature health care reform law was deceptively marketed, rejecting statements by a consultant on the plan who said aspects of Obamacare were designed to take advantage of the “stupidity” of voters. “The fact that an adviser who was never on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with in terms of the voters is not a reflection on the actual process that was run,” Obama declared at a press conference here, speaking for the first time about the comments by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber.

Conservatives need to get over their insecurities about not being cool in the eyes of liberals. ear Reader (including the many new anti-Semitic and just plain bat-guano crazy people who’ve wandered into my life in recent days), Last night I said on Twitter: Forgetting may not be the right word. Though if this was the Soviet Union, teams of fat-fingered bureaucrats would be airbrushing his likeness from all official records. In case you’re not up to speed, let’s recap. It’s really a wonderful, feel-good story for the whole family. In the Halbig decision this week, the court ruled that according...

How many days in and they are only mentioning his name?

--SNIP-- Williams began the 2-minute-and-12-second segment by remarking that “it is unlikely that most Americans have heard the name Jonathan Gruber until a few weeks ago, when a video emerged of him insulting their intelligence.” His statement can be viewed as rather ironic, considering the fact that the viewers of his own program were kept in the dark on the ObamaCare architect, depriving them knowledge of the story until now. The segment, reported on by NBC News lead Capitol Hill correspondent Kelly O’Donnell, was rather thorough as it included O’Donnell attempting to personally interview Gruber and his lawyers as they...

resident Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech, called for a minimum-wage hike and for government-mandated paid family and medical leave. "We are the only advanced country on Earth," said the President, "that doesn't guarantee paid sick leave or paid maternity leave to our workers." On the minimum wage, Obama issued this challenge: "And to everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, try it. If not, vote to give millions of the...

Jonathan Gruber, long credited as the architect of Obamacare, once discussed the necessity of taxing fat people by body weight in order to fight obesity. “Ultimately, what may be needed to address the obesity problem are direct taxes on body weight,” Gruber wrote in an essay for the National Institute for Health Care Management in April 2010, just months after helping design Obamacare with the president in the Oval Office and during the period in which he was under contract as an Obama administration consultant. …

The Congressional Budget Office says legislation the House will pass this week to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy would lead to an increase in the budget deficit of at least $235 million over the next decade, and perhaps as much as half a billion dollars. The CBO released a report Tuesday for the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, H.R. 36, which the House will consider on Thursday. That bill aims to ban abortions after 20 weeks, and is based on evidence that a fetus can feel pain once it reaches that age. CBO’s report assumes that if the...

Those so inclined can think of advantages accruing to Mitt Romney should he attempt another go at the presidency. For example: Unlike his potential opponents, he has been through this before, and his political and personal history, from his Massachusetts governorship to his leadership at Bain Capital, have already been picked through, exposed, and exploited — so surprises are improbable. Unlike his potential opponents, he knows exactly what a long, grinding national campaign is like — so he can prepare accordingly. And unlike his potential opponents, he has the fruits of his 2012 vice-presidential vetting process at his disposal —...

“Now that the Affordable Care Act has made health care a tax issue, no one can understand it,” H&R Block flatly tells taxpayers in a video that resides on its dedicated Obamacare web site. A former IRS Commissioner agrees, and cautions that the new tax requirements will be a “shock to the system,” especially afflicting low-income earners who have never itemized on their tax return.The tax preparation giant — with 24 million tax clients worldwide — reports that the Obamacare tax rules now constitute “the biggest tax code change in the last 20 years.”The company is so concerned, it has...

President Obama and Democrats are planning to make paid leave the next campaign wedge issue in order to paint Republicans as out of touch with the working class. But Jonathan Gruber may once again come to the rescue of Republicans, due to the fact that the Obamacare architect found in past research that increasing mandated benefits would result in lower wages. Gruber, you may recall, is the man who claimed that the “stupidity” of American voters aided Democrats in passing Obamacare through Congress. Heritage Foundation labor scholar James Sherk noted in a recent article for the Daily Signal that in...