Free Republic

Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economics professor and an architect of Massachusetts health reform and the Affordable Care Act, has been out of the spotlight for months. But Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump just dragged him back into it. During Sunday night’s debate, Trump brought up Gruber by name, saying that health care reform, colloquially called Obamacare, was a scam. “You know that, because Jonathan Gruber, the architect of Obamacare, was said — he said it was a great lie, it was a big lie,” Trump said. “President Obama said you keep your doctor, you keep your plan. The whole thing...

That’s not quite his verbatim quote, but it’s pretty darn close:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO “The problem is it’s a political nightmare, and people say ‘no, you can’t tax my benefits’…so what we did a lot in that room was think a lot about well how could we make this work? … And [Obama] is really a realistic guy. He was like, ‘look, I can’t just do this.’ He said ‘it’s just not going to happen politically. The bill will not pass. How do we manage to get there through phase-ins and other things?’ And we talked about...

Two well-placed sources on Capitol Hill say that the Congressional Budget Office effectively used Jonathan Gruber’s model to score Obamacare. That model favors government mandates over market competition and claims that essentially the only way to achieve a large reduction in the number of uninsured Americans is to impose an Obamacare-like individual mandate. Moreover, because the model that the CBO used in scoring Obamacare is the same one it uses today, any alternative to Obamacare that doesn’t include an individual mandate — which is to say, any conservative alternative — would be scored by the CBO as falling well short,...

The United States stands on the verge of the most significant change to our health care system since the 1965 introduction of Medicare. The bill that was passed by the House and a parallel bill before the Senate would cover most uninsured Americans, saving thousands of lives each year and putting an end to our status as the only developed country that places so many of its citizens at risk for medical bankruptcy. Moreover, the bills would accomplish this aim while reducing the federal deficit over the next decade and beyond. They would reform insurance markets, lower administrative costs, increase...

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...

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber may not have been a household name, at least before this week, despite his being described as the “architect” of Obamacare and, previously, Romneycare in Massachusetts. He sparked a furor this week after video surfaced of his talking about the “stupidity” of the American people, among other insults aimed at the voting public. Now Republicans have pounced, inventing a brand-new word: “Grubering.” Here’s what you need to know about Gruber and the controversy that’s still swirling. I've heard the name Jonathan Gruber a lot this week, but what happened and who is he? He’s an MIT...

According to BarackObama.com, President Obama's official website, Jon Gruber "helped write Obamacare." The post was written in 2012 and was about specific quotes from President Obama trying to tie Mitt Romney to ObamaCare by saying that "RomneyCare" was the model for the Affordable Care Act. In an act to hide the connection to Barack Obama after Gruber's quotes about the "stupidity of American voters" went viral, the article has been taken down by Organizing for Action. However, it was online as recently as August of this year, and a cached version still exists that clearly shows its original content. Here...

In a 2011 conversation about the Affordable Care Act, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the law more commonly known as Obamacare, talked about how the bill would get rid of all tax credits for employer-based health insurance through "mislabeling" what the tax is and who it would hit. In recent days, the past comments of Gruber -- who in a 2010 speech noted that he "helped write the federal bill" and "was a paid consultant to the Obama administration to help develop the technical details as well" -- have been given renewed attention.

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...

"...The most recent person to distance herself from the embattled MIT economist is Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress, who wrote an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal Thursday claiming that “Mr. Gruber was not, as many claim, the architect of the health-care law.”......... [snip of her denial] [picking up with the facts].....According to Tanden, Gruber provided essential budgetary information that the Congressional Budget Office needed to score the bill. “The most important arbiter of everything was the C.B.O.,” Tanden told The New York Times for a profile of Gruber. “We knew the numbers he...

The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), intends to negotiate with Jonathan Gruber, Ph.D. on a sole sources basis for technical assistance in evaluating options for national healthcare reform. The basis for restricting competition is the authority of 41 USC 253(c)(1) 106-1(b) because there is only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy DHHS requirements. The anticipated contract period will be eight months.

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...

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.

Obama used the Massachusetts law developed by Gruber as the blueprint for Obamacare When asked in 2012 what were the differences between RomneyÂ’s and ObamaÂ’s plans he said "They are the same bleeping bill! More seriously, the core of the ACA [Affordable Care Act] is exactly the same as what we did here in Massachusetts" Romneycare was held up as a success. It became the exemplar model. But in fact it is a failure. Gruber himself says the "dirty secret" is that a large portion of the cost of Romneycare was paid by the Feds. Here is Gruber and the...

It started out as a joke this morning. I often listen to the Steve Kane talk radio show here in South Florida. Kane's co-host on the show is Brian Craig and I often text message jokes or humorous observations to him while the show is on the air. Since they were talking about Jonathan Gruber and later about Obama's ILLEGAL executive order on the illegals I sent him a joking observation: "Was Jonathan Gruber the architect of the executive order amnesty plan?" Well, a few moments after sending that message to Brian, I got to thinking if it could actually...

"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...

MIT economist Johnathan Gruber is the architect of both Romneycare and Obamacare. Speaking to a group of like minded progressives last year Gruber declared that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.” He went on to declare “and basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.” He’s referencing, in part, the Obamacare tax. The administration and the Democrats had to hide from the American people to true cost of Obamacare. If voters knew the cost they wouldn’t support Obamacare. Thus it had to be...

Outed as a congenital liar, Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber said that "lack of transparency" was a major part of getting Obamacare passed because “the stupidity of the American voter” would have killed the law if more people knew what was in it. Gruber, the MIT professor who served as a technical consultant to the Obama administration during Obamacare’s design, also made clear during a panel quietly captured on video that the individual mandate, which was only upheld by the Supreme Court because it was a tax, was not actually a tax. “This bill was written in a tortured way to...

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'!