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Firedoglake has been researching the relationship of MIT economist Jonathan Gruber with the Obama administration with regard to health care reform. You’ll find posts by emptywheel, dday and Jon Walker about the apparent conflicts of interest on Gruber’s part, that of the Obama administration and the media covering health care reform. We’re still looking at the money – yes, follow the money, as Deep Throat once said – paid out to Gruber by the government. OUR MONEY, our tax dollars, paid out to Gruber under three administrations. You can view the numbers at this link, at which you’ll find a...

The MIT economist who is the brains behind Obamacare has made quite a stir with his admission that President Obama’s health care takeover was built on lies. Mr. Gruber says he was willing to say and do whatever it took to advance the scheme, and now it’s clear why. Obamacare made Mr. Gruber a multimillionaire, and at the expense of the taxpayers. Video of Mr. Gruber’s remarks, delivered at a University of Pennsylvania health care conference last year, has surfaced in which he explained how the details of Obamacare were kept under wraps until the measure was rammed through the...

Earlier this week, the Daily Caller found videos of economist Jonathan Gruber, who helped write the Affordable Care Act, committing gaffes. Conservatives have responded with wild anger at what they take to be a confession that the hated law was designed to fool the public. Gruber “said that lack of transparency was a major part of getting ObamaCare passed, and that it was written in such a way as to take advantage of ‘the stupidity of the American voter,’” cries Fox News. The right-wing media is treating Gruber’s comments as a “scandal” and even proposing possible hearings in Congress. The...

I grew up in a Democratic family. I have been a registered Democrat since age 18, a Democratic candidate for statewide office in Colorado and a party precinct captain in that caucus state. I’ve volunteered for numerous Democratic candidates and contributed to party causes and campaigns. The 2014 election results were extremely disappointing for me, but hardly a surprise. I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, then lost my job in the Great Recession. I was lucky; my brother lost his job and his house. I survived on part-time jobs while paying out-of-pocket for my health insurance. I voted for...

And who didn't take notice? If that is the manner of how Nancy Pelosi speaks, with the pauses, stuttering, stammering and "Brain Stoppages" as she was trying to explain to us that she never heard of Jonathan Gruber, you would think it was time for her to retire. And to think there was once a time when she was third in line for the Presidency? And this also applies to Harry Reid, then again, we all share the same opinions of "Prince Harry".

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...

After Massachusetts, California came calling. So did Connecticut, Delaware, Kansas, Minnesota, Oregon, Wisconsin and Wyoming. They all wanted Jonathan Gruber, a numbers wizard at M.I.T., to help them figure out how to fix their health care systems, just as he had helped Mitt Romney overhaul health insurance when he was the Massachusetts governor. Then came the call in 2008 from President-elect Obama’s transition team, the one that officially turned this stay-at-home economics professor into Mr. Mandate. “Creating a good model from scratch would have taken months, maybe years,” said Lawrence H. Summers, who was the director of President Obama’s National...

Despite numerous videos showing ObamaCare architect Jon Gruber calling the American people "stupid," a number of liberals on social media and liberal websites do not believe that what he said is real or in context. More than that, a number of people on the left are actually accusing conservatives and Fox News of making up the story. Here are a few statements on Democratic Underground. "Smells:" "It is:" Maybe it's all a plot by Fox and Nazis: ...At Daily Kos, liberals are saying its purely manufactured: Or it's a rewriting of history:

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...

In her first public remarks since Election Day last week, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi defended her decision to run to keep her post atop the House Democratic Caucus, and doesn’t sound likely to relinquish it anytime soon. “I don’t understand why this question should even come up,” the California Democrat said at a press conference Thursday. “I’m here as long as the members want me to be here. Pelosi suggested that she wasn’t, as many expect, looking to serve one more term as minority leader before retiring in 2016 — when, colleagues hope, Hillary Rodham Clinton will be elected...

On June 13, 2012, Obamacare Jonathan Gruber was interviewed by Frontline. He told them that the Cadillac tax issue was addressed in 2009. Obama knew it was going to be a problem, and they all agreed to lie about it. What Jonathan Gruber is taking heat for right now, was planned out specifically with Barack Obama. It wasn’t just him. It was all of them, with Obama in the room taking part.

Washington(CNN)--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 the technical details...

Published on Nov 13, 2014 House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has joined in with the White House’s attempt to distance itself from a key figure in the creation of the Affordable Care Act who claimed the bill was passed with help from “lack of transparency” and “the stupidity of the American voter.” MIT professor Jonathan Gruber — who assisted congressional staffers in writing the bill — made such claims last year during an academic conference, but the video only became widely-viewed this week. He has since appeared on MSNBC to call the comments “inappropriate,” but did not deny his underlying...

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...

Gruber saves some special scorn for the Republican governors who have bravely said no to...Free Money! "What I don't get is these STUPID governors who are turning down the Medicaid expansion," he said. "This is preposterously STUPID. First of all, your low-income people get health-insurance, and you get billions and billions of dollars of stimulus in health-care spending. For example, there are one million uninsured Floridians who are below the poverty line. The federal government is saying we'll pay to insure them, and, in addition, we're sending billions of dollars to you. And Rick Scott says no. There is no...

Kossack Mote Dai's discovery that "objective" analyst and MIT economist Jonathon Gruber has received a sole-source contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services since June 19, 2009 to consult on the “President’s health reform proposal" has gained some larger attention. Marcy reported that he has two contracts for a total of $392,600 to consult on the plan. The issue is that Gruber has consistently been referenced by the White House as an objective analyst in support of the bill--including the controversial excise tax--without disclosing his role as a contractor on the issue. Link: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/1/8/823043/-Transparency-Problem-in-HCR-Debate

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber has, for a long time, been the go-to guy for people who want to defend the Senate bill. (Today Sen. John Kerry has an article on the Huffington Post defending the excise tax in which he quotes only one economist, Jonathan Gruber.) Gruber does not just support the Senate bill, he defends the bill by making completely ridiculous, over-the-top claims about the bill, which border dangerously close to outright lies. For months, I have wondered why Gruber was committing what I considered economic malpractice with his untruthful statements. I previously thought that he was just a...

It's hard to believe that I would actually link to a Jane Hamsher article at the Huffington Post without reveling in its stupidity but this article is quite good, well researched, and doesn't pull any biased punches. When Obama is pissing off the far left, things are baaaad. Here we got the tale of Jonathan Gruber, a MIT genius or something, who was paid close to 400 thousand dollars to do an analysis of ObamaCare....and the White House used that analysis to sale the bill without disclosing the relationship: The White House is placing a giant collective bet on Gruber's...

JONATHAN GRUBER, M.I.T.: Let’s start with understanding that we're not talking about the vast majority of Americans. This law is really leaving those with employer insurance, those with government insurance alone. We’re talking about a small minority of Americans that buy insurance on their own through the individual market. CHUCK TODD: Still millions of people. GRUBER: Exactly. It's 12 million people, about a third of which will end up paying more under this law. And that as you said in the introductions sort of the idea. We currently have a highly discriminatory system where if you’re sick, if you’ve been...

RUSH: Okay, folks, there are other aspects of this that I want to get to that have nothing to do with what Obama did yesterday. Jonathan Gruber, MIT, who was an architect of Obamacare, was on NBC with F. Chuck Todd. I'm just teasing this. Do you remember Dick Gephardt talking about the winners of life's lottery? In Gephardt's world, the winners of life's lottery were the rich. If you win a lottery, you're what? You're lucky and nothing more. You're just plain lucky and that's not fair. And Gephardt portrayed the wealthy as the winners of life's lottery, basically...