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Some liberals like to pass Josh Barro off as a conservative. The New York Times correspondent debunked that notion himself, tweeting that he was most easily understood as a "moderate." But after his appearance on MSNBC today, another term might more aptly apply: elitist liberal. Speaking with Alex Wagner, Barro crammed a carload of condescension into thirty seconds. Barro claimed that health insurance is "weirdly complicated," and thus that Americans can't be permitted to choose it as they would other products. No, we can't let people use their "own judgment." The free market "doesn't work very well" with health insurance....

The original Obama movement was so rapturous that stating the obvious — you can't eat hope and the rhetoric was mostly empty — seemed small-minded and a cynical snub to those people who clearly felt they were about to see real change, especially black voters who were feeling the kind of fierce emotions that most of us could never understand. "We are the ones we've been waiting for," he'd tell the crowds. Whatever that meant, it sounded good. Today, though, Obama must — must — at least be contemplating the possibility that he has failed. Six years after he assumed...

Who’s up for another Jonathan Gruber video? On April 9, 2014, Gruber appeared on the “Curbside Consult” interview series with Harold Pollack, at healthinsurance.org; the host introduced Gruber as the “architect of Obamacare”, and Gruber made no objection. Pollack says, “One of the things that’s really striking to me is there’s a politics of impunity towards poor people, particularly non-white poor people that is almost a feature rather than a bug in the internal politics in some of these states, not to cover people under Medicaid, even if it’s financially very advantageous to do so.” Gruber’s response: That’s a great

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Republicans are hyping past comments from ObamaCare consultant Jonathan Gruber as a way to distract from what’s going well for the healthcare law. After saying that Gruber’s view that the healthcare law was passed partly because of the “stupidity” of the American voter is not shared by “anybody at the White House,” Earnest challenged claims that ObamaCare was not passed in a transparent way. He also suggested that few Americans are paying attention to the controversy. “People are understandably pretty tired of relitigating all the fights from 2009 and 2010,” Earnest said Tuesday at...

“My job was just to see if the numbers added up,” Jonathan Gruber, the controversial architect of ObamaCare, told PBS two years ago. And add up the numbers he 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.

ObamaCare has become big business for an elite network of Washington lobbyists and consultants who helped shape the law from the inside. More than 30 former administration officials, lawmakers and congressional staffers who worked on the healthcare law have set up shop on K Street since 2010. ObamaCare has become big business for an elite network of Washington lobbyists and consultants who helped shape the law from the inside. More than 30 former administration officials, lawmakers and congressional staffers who worked on the healthcare law have set up shop on K Street since 2010.

Our own Ben Howe made this video for the folks at American Commitment that explains the entire #GruberGate kerfuffle in 2 minutes. The video is damning and really explains what ought to be page A1 material on every newspaper in the whole country. Check it out:

Apparently Gruber has been advising the Obama administration on amnesty. But Obama's never heard of him...

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...

California Regulator Knocks Anthem, Blue Shield On Obamacare Networks By CHAD TERHUNE California finds 'significant errors' in Obamacare networks offered by two leading insurers Underscoring a persistent complaint about Obamacare coverage, a California regulator found that two major health insurers violated state law and significantly overstated the availability of doctors on their new health-law policies. More than 25% of physicians listed by Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of California were not taking Covered California patients or they were no longer at the location listed by the companies, according to state reports released Tuesday. The results of the five-month investigation...

They'd be better off with "less scope for choosing the wrong plan."In a 2009 paper, “Choice Inconsistencies Among the Elderly: Evidence from Plan Choice in the Medicare Part D Program,” Obamacare advisor Jonathan Gruber argued that there were too many Medicare Part D plans for seniors to choose from, which led them to make bad decisions when enrolling in a plan. In the paper, written for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Gruber wrote with Jason T. Abaluck that the privatization of the public Medicare program had resulted in dozens of private insurers offering a wide variety of insurance products...

The reaction of the MSM to the Gruber tapes is revealing. Today’s article by Chris Cillizza tries to misdirect the issue into a personality conflict between Gruber and Conservatives who he thinks are the object of Gruber’s charge that the American people are stupid. His article, about Gruber as catnip for conservatives tries to make the story about Conservative pique, not the fact that Gruber did something that you are never supposed to do when you pull a sting: expose the sting. A good sting never ends, but Gruber ended the ObamaCare sting. So the press, after hoping it would...

The Overlooked Irony of Jonathan Gruber's Candid Statements MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber has been captured on a number of video recordings stating that the Democrats relied upon and exploited the “stupidity of the American voter” to pass Obamacare. But American voters are not really stupid – not most of them anyway. Even the average Democrat voter is not stupid. Rather, Democrat voters are badly misinformed because they rely on the leftist media for information and opinion. So what Gruber and the Democrats really exploited was not the stupidity of the American voter, but corrupt and dishonest reporting by leftist journalists....

The Obama administration can try to distance itself from Jonathan Gruber all it wants, but a 2012 press release from Obama’s own presidential campaign shows that when it comes to Obamacare, the president and Gruber are joined at the hip.

<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>

The Origin of Obamacare: The Organization and Their Plan Part 1   Quentin Young, Sen. Barack Obama, 2003 Quentin Young is a founding member of the Chicago-based Physicians for a National Health Program. [1][2] Young is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America [14] Peter Orris co-founded the Physicians for a National Health Program [3]. Orris was a member of Students for a Democratic Society at Harvard [4] Physicians for a National Health Program advocates single-payer national health insurance. [10] They both serve on the National Physicians Alliance Advisory Board. [5] Obama learned about single-payer health care from his...

Minnesota was one of the states where Jonathan Gruber, an economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was involved in the creation of the federal Affordable Care Act, helped to set up a local health insurance exchange. Gruber has come under fire for comments he made a year ago about how the federal law was passed. Video that surfaced this month showed him saying that a "lack of transparency" and "the stupidity of the American voter" were key to getting the federal law passed. He was paid $330,000 for his work in Minnesota. What did he produce? Gruber, who...

After the election drubbing his party suffered in November, President Obama now seems to be losing media support for his nakedly defiant stance on at least a couple issues.

"Revenge of the Wonks" might be a good name for the Gruber/ObamaCare fiasco, or maybe "The Wonk-in-Chief's Comeuppance." White House press secretary Josh Earnest on Tuesday claimed that ObamaCare/RomneyCare co-architect Jonathan Gruber's videotaped remarks about pulling the wool over the eyes of the "stupid" American people "are not views that are shared by anybody at the White House."

Johnathan Gruber is a fascist. He’s willing to put up with a little bit of private ownership but only if the government dictates private transactions. He’s more than willing to help Congress manipulate laws in order to achieve government control. Much of the hubbub over Gruber’s comments on Obamacare manipulations put the blame on him. Make no mistake, calling the American people stupid is on Gruber. However, Gruber isn’t a politician and it’s hardly surprising when an academic with no political experience doesn’t know how to play the game. Academics aren’t nearly as smart as they or the left think...