Free Republic

The Obama administration’s much-touted enrollment figure of 7.3 million includes nearly a half-million people who have only purchased dental plans, the House Oversight Committee has found. Without the 400,000 people enrolled in dental-only plans, the total enrollment for ObamaCare drops to 6.97 million, according an investigation by the committee, which was first reported by Bloomberg News. “Instead of offering the public an accurate accounting, the administration engaged in an effort to obscure and downplay the number of dropouts,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the committee, wrote in a statement to Bloomberg. Enrollment figures have strayed from the initial 8...

<p>"....At a town hall meeting on health care on July 23, 2009 in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Obama explained that the thinking of the Cadillac tax was to target plans that spend unnecessarily and excessively, thus driving up health care costs, such as a $25,000 plan, "so one that's a lot more expensive and a lot fancier than the one that even members of Congress get."</p>

..."He also serves on the Massachusetts board that oversees the state’s new health care exchanges. Along with these credentials, Mr. Gruber’s position as an adviser to the influential Congressional Budget Office also left him perfectly positioned to advise the White House on health reform. “The most important arbiter of everything was the C.B.O.,” said Neera Tanden, who was a senior adviser for health reform at the Department of Health and Human Services. ...

WASHINGTON — As Americans shop in the health insurance marketplace for a second year, President Obama is depending more than ever on the insurance companies that five years ago he accused of padding profits and canceling coverage for the sick. Those same insurers have long viewed government as an unreliable business partner that imposed taxes, fees and countless regulations and had the power to cut payment rates and cap profit margins. But since the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010, the relationship between the Obama administration and insurers has evolved into a powerful, mutually beneficial partnership that has been...

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.

Far more troubling, however, is the lack of disclosure on the part of the White House, the Senate, the DNC and other Democratic leaders who distributed Gruber’s work and cited it as independent validation of their proposals, orchestrating the appearance of broad consensus when in fact it was all part of the same effort. The White House is placing a giant collective bet on Gruber’s “assumptions” to justify key portions of the Senate bill, which they allowed people to believe was independent verification. Now that we know that Gruber’s work was not that of an independent analyst but rather work...

Jonathan Gruber was “the man” behind Obamacare, according to a former adviser to President Barack Obama. “The problem is not that Gruber helped them put Obamacare together, because he was the man,” Steve Rattner, who worked as Obama’s lead adviser in 2009 for the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry, said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “The problem is what he said in the last two weeks and how the White House has handled it,” Rattner added. Rattner said his influence was enormous. “Jonathan Gruber was, back in the day in 2009, the guru on health care,” said Rattner,...

“My job was just to see if the numbers added up,” Dr. Jonathan Gruber, the controversial architect of ObamaCare, told PBS two years ago. And add up the numbers did – at least in terms of Gruber’s consulting fees. A Fox News review of state and federal websites, as well as published reports, finds the MIT economist----and his firm----have secured millions in federal and state contracts stretching back over the last fifteen years. Most famously, HHS retained Gruber March 2009 to produce, as the contract stipulated, “a series of technical memoranda on the estimated changes in health insurance coverage and...