Free Republic

“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...

Ron Weddington, one of the attorneys who drafted the brief for abortion rights in Roe V Wade, wrote a private letter to President-elect Bill Clinton arguing for the state to use abortion as population control. This letter was written in 1992: “[Y]ou can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country. No, I’m not advocating some sort of mass extinction of these unfortunate people. Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who...

Back in 09–when Obamacare advocates castigated those who worried that Obamacare would lead to rationing–Jonathan Gruber said get the law passed first, then refuse treatment later. From the Daily Caller story: “Let’s get the people covered and then let’s do cost control,” [Gruber said] Gruber also said that the only way to control costs is to effectively deny treatment. “The real substance of cost control is all about a single thing: telling patients they can’t have something they want. It’s about telling patients, ‘That surgery doesn’t do any good, so if you want it you have to pay the full...

From the first day of 2011, Mitt Romney was the favorite to win the 2012 Republican presidential primary campaign. No one else was even close. The 2016 outlook could not be more different. Offered the choice to bet on one single candidate to win the nomination versus the rest of the field, the choice would have to be "the field." For the first time in years, there is no one next in line. And without a former vice president or powerhouse former candidate looking likely to run, Republicans are shaping up to spend the next year and a half fighting...

Jonathan Gruber, sage of MIT and proud champion of the Affordable Care Act, may well have had the worst year in American public life. His repeated demonstrations of arrogance, contempt for the American people and smug self-satisfaction brought mortification to his party and president. His glib references to the redistributionist aspects of the Affordable Care Act gave the lie to the Democratic Party's dubious claim that the mandate was not a tax, along with the excruciating (to Democrats) acknowledgment that -- presidential oaths to the contrary notwithstanding -- Democrats regard "nontransparency" as their friend. So, all hail the verbally incontinent...

We all remember it well.  Governor Palin’s infamous statement on what was to become ObamaCare way back in 2009: The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have...

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber got his 15 weeks of fame in 2014 when videos surfaced in which he candidly admitted to deception, and a jaundiced view of American public opinion, while promoting Obamacare as it travelled its rocky road to passage by Congress. Actually, Accuracy in Academia has been covering Jonathan Gruber’s “mini mes” for decades. Just last Fall: o “Once upon a time, there was a saying among the young: ‘The answer is more beer. What is the question?’” I wrote on December 8, 2014. “Substitute the word ‘government’ for the word ‘beer’ and you have what could be...

Every single thing liberals say is a lie. No exceptions. We conservatives always knew it, but 2014 was the year when the rest of America began to understand. And 2014 was the year that Americans had to choose sides – would they stand with the liberal liars or with us conservatives? Last November, they chose us conservatives, and maybe the truth will be enough to stop Hillary Clinton and save our country in 2016. The truth is poison to liberalism, so no wonder liberals hate the idea of a free press – after all, they are the ones who argued...

So-called Obamacare “architect” Jonathan Gruber was called to testify at a Tuesday House regarding his past controversial remarks about the creation and passage of the health care law. While many of the testy exchanges that occurred during the hearing were covered and even trumpeted by conservative media, a furious Mark Levin said the exercise was pointless. “The very Republicans grilling this guy don’t plan to do a damn thing about Obamacare! They’re not going to use the power of the purse to control any piece of it!” Levin shouted on the air. “So, what is the point of a hearing?...

Barack and Michelle Obama, speaking to People Magazine, of all disappointments, shared the disheartening news that they have experienced what they called racism. Barack, for example, apparently has had trouble, before he was president, hailing a cab in Chicago, to which an immediate thought might occur to anyone who has been to Chicago: Who hasn't? Also, Barack, at a black-tie event, when he, too, was in festive livery, apparently was asked by another guest if he would get them a cup of coffee. For her recollection, Michelle came up with a visit to a Target store as first lady. She...

If you’re looking for a state with a reliable Leftward tilt, you’d be hard pressed to do better than Vermont. After all, this is the place which has repeatedly elected Bernie Sanders – a man who considers the Democrat Party too conservative for his tastes – to statewide office since 1991. So in terms of socialist experimental laboratories, this is the spot where you’d want to launch progressive initiatives and take them for a test spin. That was the plan for Governor Peter Shumlin, who had promised his constituents that they would soon be enjoying the first in the...

Jonathan Gruber is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) health economist who was one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare) in America, modelled on the UK's NHS. Not once, but twice he has been caught on tape saying that the "stupidity of the American voter" made a certain amount of duplicity necessary to the passage of Obamacare. The first time was during the panel sessions at the 2013 Annual Health Economics Conference, the video of which you can see by clicking on the "Enza Ferreri Blog" link above. (The relevant remarks are at 20:25.)...

Jonathan Gruber should have been Time's Person of the Year. The magazine gave it to the "Ebola Fighters" instead. Good for them; they're doing God's work. Still, Gruber would have been better. Time's Person of the Year designation has lost a lot of its stature over recent years. Part of its decline can probably be attributed to the fact that it's come to be seen as an honorific. It was originally conceived to recognize the person who, "for better or for worse ... has done the most to influence the events of the year." So Adolf Hitler (1938) and Josef...

Jonathan Gruber should have been Time’s Person of the Year. The magazine gave it to the “Ebola Fighters” instead. Good for them; they’re doing God’s work. Still, Gruber would have been better. Time’s Person of the Year designation has lost a lot of its stature over recent years. Part of its decline can probably be attributed to the fact that it’s come to be seen as an honorific. It was originally conceived to recognize the person who, “for better or for worse . . . has done the most to influence the events of the year.” So Adolf Hitler (1938)...

Finally. James O'Keefe interviews the gentleman that exposed Gruber and happens upon the true reason for ObamaCare. I've been thinking this for over a year. ObamaCare is nothing more than turning back the the provision of healthcare coverage paid for by employers that was brought about by FDR's wage & price controls implemented in the 1940s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942 There you have it. It's just about the money coming out of your pocket.

Gov. John Kasich’s Obamacare expansion has put 450,941 Ohioans on Medicaid, outpacing his administration’s projections by 24 percent. Instead of tempering leftist support for the expansion, budget-busting enrollment is portrayed as good news for Ohio; Obamacare sticks federal taxpayers with 100 percent of Medicaid expansion benefit costs through 2016. Kasich — who expanded Medicaid over the General Assembly’s express disapproval — told attendees at a Dec. 4 infant mortality summit to march in favor of more Obamacare expansion spending, but critics are encouraging legislative opponents to stand their ground. “Kasich is threatening to organize protests to ensure the state continues...

2014 is the Year of the Liberal Lie By Kyle Smith Bowe Bergdahl. The IRS’s missing e-mails. Lena Dunham. “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Jonathan Gruber. GM and that faulty ignition switch. Andrew Cuomo and that anti-corruption commission. The Secret Service and that White House intruder. Rachel Noerdlinger and her “disabled” son. Rolling Stone and gang rape. 2014 was the year when truth was optional. 2014 was the year when convenient fabrication was the weapon of choice for celebrities, activists, big business and politicians. 2014 was the Year of the Lie. In each case, the liars used their powerful positions to...

If only Halloween hadn’t passed, someone could go as MIT’s Jonathan Gruber. He is the economist most likely to get people in Washington to run out of a room. At the moment he is a problem for the Obama administration and Democrats, though he’s spooked Republicans before, too. At an academic panel in 2013, Gruber said of the Affordable Care Act: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure” the Congressional Budget Office “did not score the mandate as taxes.” He also said that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” and added, “Call it the...

Jonathan Gruber’s health care forecasting is failing in Colorado as Vermont’s Gov. Peter Shumlin prepares to use the economist’s math for single-payer health care. As Vermonters anxiously await a Gruber-modeled financing plan for Green Mountain Care, modeling done for Colorado’s health exchange by Jonathan Gruber Associates has proven wildly erroneous. In 2011, following Colorado’s decision to set up a state health exchange for Obamacare, the state hired Gruber to forecast enrollment trends from which the state and federal government could estimate costs. According to a presentation delivered to the Colorado Health Benefit Exchange Board on Sept. 16, 2011, and provided...