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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,...

gruber - new word

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...

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...

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...

"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

In late October, continuing a four-year pattern of making such claims, MIT's Jonathan Gruber, who along with Ezekiel "Zeke the Bleak" Emanuel is considered one of the two "architects" of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, pointed to a study which claimed that "the Affordable Care Act is working even better than expected, producing more coverage for much less money." But, as Wingfield noted in his Friday column, Gruber sang a totally different tune when quoted in the Washington Post on Thursday. WaPo's Sarah Kliff failed to tag Gruber as an Obamacare architect, making it appear as if he's just...

The secret court that oversees the nation’s intelligence activities renewed its approval of the National Security Agency’s telephone-records program on Friday, granting the government a new three-month window to collect data on all Americans’ phone calls. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office announced the court’s ruling in a statement, though officials didn’t make the ruling itself public, saying it was going through declassification procedures. The decision marks the 36th time the program has been approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “It is the administration’s view, consistent with the recent holdings of the United States District Courts for...

State officials said the Covered California website got 645,000 hits during the first day of enrollment, far fewer than the 5 million it reported Tuesday. The state exchange had cited the 5 million figure as a sign of strong consumer interest and a major reason people had so much difficulty using its $313-million online enrollment system. Dana Howard, a spokesman for Covered California, said the error was the result of internal miscommunication.

Full title: NSA, DEA, IRS Lie About Fact That Americans Are Routinely Spied On By Our Government: Time For A Special Prosecutor It seems that every day brings a new revelation about the scope of the NSA’s heretofore secret warrantless mass surveillance programs. And as we learn more, the picture becomes increasingly alarming. Last week we discovered that the NSA shares information with a division of the Drug Enforcement Agency called the Special Operations Division (SOD). The DEA uses the information in drug investigations. But it also gives NSA data out to other agencies – in particular, the Internal Revenue...

Suddenly it is imperative that Congress investigate details surrounding the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens. I've never felt that way before. But Jake Tapper's scoop changed my mind. To be clear, it isn't at all certain that the CIA was secretly funneling Libyan weapons to Syria, long before Congress "lifted its hurdles" on arming Syrian rebels. But if CNN's report is correct, the CIA is at minimum trying to hide something huge from Congress, something that CIA agents might otherwise want to reveal -- itself a reason for Congress to press hard for information. And if speculation about moving...

Secretary of State John Kerry spent time lounging around on his yacht Wednesday while the Egyptian military was deposing their country's democratically elected president Mohammed Morsi, according to various reports. When Kerry was first spotted on his yatch, called "Isabel," near his vacation home in Nantucket, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki called the report "completely inaccurate" saying that the Secretary of State had been "working all day and on the phone dealing with the crisis in Egypt," according to CBS News. Psaki even went so far as to deny that Kerry was even on the boat.

Well, golly, this might be just a tad inconvenient for the establishment spin on PRISM, if true. After the Washington Post and then the Guardian exposed the NSA’s Internet snooping program, a few of the named Internet companies denied giving the NSA any access to their servers. Instead, they told the New York Times that they provided blocks of information pursuant to FISA court orders and placed them in virtual dropboxes for the agency to access. That would, as Red Alert Politics notes, make the program legal and narrower than originally thought, although still a worrisome development for privacy. However,...

The so-called "backdoor amnesty" for illegal aliens is no longer merely another bad idea from the Obama administration. According to the Houston Chronicle, the Department of Homeland Security is trying to dismiss thousands of deportation cases against "suspected illegal immigrants." The Chronicle reports the Obama amnesty effort began "about a month ago" in Houston, where the Department of Homeland Security now has five attorneys working full-time on this backdoor amnesty for illegal aliens. The amnesty program is expected to be rolled out nationwide soon. Senator John Cornyn blasted the Obama amnesty: "This situation is just another side effect of President...

Part of President Obama's health care bill depends on the government telling doctors and hospitals what are purportedly the most efficient medical procedures they should use. Americans are supposed to trust Mr. Obama's bureaucrats over their own doctors. Meanwhile, a new report from the Government Accountability Office shows that the Obama administration has been an utter failure at identifying the efficiency of a wide range of products. As government encroaches on more aspects of American life, the federal bureaucracy is increasingly incompetent. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy are charged with identifying how energy-efficient different products are....