Free Republic

NEW YORK – The Obamacare architect at the center of controversy for his frank admissions that passing the president’s signature legislation required lying to the American people published a paper during the Clinton administration observing that legalizing abortion saved the government $14 billion in assistance to economically disadvantaged mothers, including African Americans, and lowered crime. MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber argued in his paper that without the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, “marginal children” would have been born to many poor mothers. He said statistics show these children would have been 70 percent more likely to live in a single-parent...

A new analysis by a leading MIT economist provides new ammunition for Democrats as the Senate begins formally debating the historic health-reform bill being pushed by President Barack Obama. The report concludes that under the Senate’s health-reform bill, Americans buying individual coverage will pay less than they do for today's typical individual market coverage, and would be protected from high out-of-pocket costs. So Democrats will argue that under the Senate bill, Americans would pay less for more. The new document arms Democrats with a response to the contention of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that the bill would mean...

"Stupid is as stupid does" -- Forrest Gump Unless you regularly follow conservative media, you may not have heard what one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) thinks about you. Jonathan Gruber is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology health economist who helped craft Obamacare. In a rare moment of unvarnished candor, Gruber told an audience last year at the University of Pennsylvania the law passed because of the "stupidity of the American voter." In what can only be described as a smoking gun -- meaning there is no way to spin his remarks as "out of...

In addition to CBO, MIT's Jon Gruber has also done a study on premiums. And what does he conclude? He concludes, using Congressional Budget Office data, the Senate bill could mean people purchasing individual insurance would save every year $200 for single coverage and $500 for family coverage in 2009 dollars. Most people think he is one of the best outside experts. He has big computer models. He takes the CBO data and, in some respects, he has helped CBO by giving some information to CBO that it otherwise does not have. Mr. Gruber also points out that people with...

... feast your eyes on all this about 'Who is Jonathan Gruber'!

Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber said Tuesday that he regrets saying that aspects of Obamacare needed to be concealed from the public due to the “stupidity of the American voter.” “Do you stand by the comments in that video?,” MSNBC host Ronan Farrow asked Gruber, referring to a video of Gruber explaining how a lack of transparency helped Obamacare pass into law. “The comments in the video were made at an academic conference,” Gruber said. “I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately and I regret having made those comments.” Farrow then argued on Gruber’s behalf that

"Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. Call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass." That was MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the key architects of ObamaCare, explaining how ObamaCare was purposefully designed to obfuscate how it was financed, how the subsidies worked and other unpleasant features of the law. [snip] Gruber's comments, made at a 2013 conference but just now making the rounds on the Internet, are the polar opposite of what Democrats promised the public.