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It’s actually old news that Mitt Romney’s health-care experts helped design Obamacare. Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who was the architect of both laws, received nearly $400,000 as a consultant to the Obama administration for “technical assistance in evaluating options for national healthcare reform.” And, as Isikoff notes, while President Obama may not have called Romney, he did call Gruber. Indeed, White House visitor logs show that “senior White House officials had a dozen meetings in 2009 with three [Romney] health-care advisers and experts.” These included Gruber (five); Jon Kingsdale (three), executive director of Massachusetts’ new subsidized insurance exchange; and...

Congressional Republicans seized Wednesday on controversial comments made by a former health-care consultant to the Obama administration, with one leading House conservative suggesting that hearings could be called in response as part of the GOP effort to dismantle the law in the next Congress and turn public opinion ahead of the 2016 election. "We may want to have hearings on this," said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), an influential voice among GOP hardliners and a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in an interview at the Capitol. "We shouldn't be surprised they were misleading us."

As if Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts wasn’t a big enough blow to the Obama Administration’s hopes for overhauling the health care system, there was another disclosure last week that eviscerated some of the Administration’s key claims related to cost savings.    It was revealed that last June the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had awarded a no-bid contract worth nearly $300,000 to MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, the Administration’s star witness for the superior cost-containment features of health care reform.  Obama Administration officials, and most of the journalists celebrating Gruber’s findings, had neglected to mention this detail when trumpeting...

A third video has surfaced of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber bragging about pulling the wool over the eyes of the American public in order to help implement Obamacare. “It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter,” Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said during a speech at the University of Rhode Island in November 2012. He was discussing what is known as the Cadillac tax and how it came into being.

Call this Gruber 2: Stupid and Stupider. Jonathan Gruber attempted to escape scrutiny for his October 2013 declaration that Americans are “stupid” and that ObamaCare was designed to exploit that and hide its true nature by saying that he regretted his “off the cuff” comments. “I basically spoke inappropriately,” he told Ronan Farrow, “and I regret having made those comments.”Last night, though, a second video emerged from the same time period in which Gruber explained that the ACA passed “because the American people are too stupid” to understand the law. Megyn Kelly wondered last night how this squared with...

I always thought that most of what goes on in govt today equates to racketeering. I believe the public is routinely defrauded by public officials. By deception, obamacare was enacted and now the public must pony up under the program or pay fines. Here's a FindLaw definition of racketeering: "1 : the extortion of money or advantage by threat or force 2 : a pattern of illegal activity (as extortion and murder) that is carried out in furtherance of an enterprise (as a criminal syndicate) which is owned or controlled by those engaged in such activity " And here's one...

Call this Gruber 2: Stupid and Stupider. Jonathan Gruber attempted to escape scrutiny for his October 2013 declaration that Americans are “stupid” and that ObamaCare was designed to exploit that and hide its true nature by saying that he regretted his “off the cuff” comments. “I basically spoke inappropriately,” he told Ronan Farrow, “and I regret having made those comments.” Last night, though, a second video emerged from the same time period in which Gruber explained that the ACA passed “because the American people are too stupid” to understand the law. Megyn Kelly wondered last night how this squared with...

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

"Let me say it as simply as I can: Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency."Barack Obama, January 2009. See him say it for yourself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4AJ843ERnUThis is HUGE. It proves that Obamacare is premised on lies. And it proves more than that. Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which...

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

Young Ronan Farrow of MSNBC who won a Cronkite Journalism Award three days after appearing on the air seems to have learned a grownup word that he loves to bandy about: "nuanced." It was that word that Farrow employed to excuse the infamous remarks by Gruber that it was important to deceive the public about Obamacare. Most of you have already seen the Gruber video since Newsbusters was the first major website to feature it but for those of you in the mainstream media who still pretend like Senator Angus King to know nothing about Jonathan Gruber, you can review...

Via Newsbusters, after yesterday’s unpleasantness and the Halbig “speak-o” fiasco of a few months ago, I see Democrats (plus independents in name only like King) have finally reached the “Jon who?” stage of their Gruber problem. This is the game we’re playing now, eh? KILMEADE: They just lied about a health plan to the American people, called the stupidity of the American voter and bragged about the lack of transparency. KING: This is one guy. I don’t know who this guy was. All I know is that it’s important for people to have health insurance. And if you guys are...

On MSNBC Tuesday, Gruber told Ronan Farrow that he “spoke inappropriately” when he made the comments, which surfaced this week in an online video. “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.”

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: This is incredible. The liberals at the University of Pennsylvania tried to take down the video of Jonathan Gruber saying they had to dumb down the presentation of Obamacare because of the stupidity of the American voter. They thought they could take the video down and make the issue go away. You remember Jonathan Gruber. By the way, he's the architect of Obamacare, and I should say that he's one of the primary architects of Romneycare as well. It was in October of last year at the University of Pennsylvania's 24th Annual Health Economics Conference, and he...

ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber said that lack of transparency was a major part of getting ObamaCare passed, and that it was written in such a way as to take advantage of "the stupidity of the American voter." 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 make sure CBO did not score...

The University of Pennsylvania which had originally posted this has now pulled down the video from their site. But this is an attempt on the part of Jonathan Gruber and company to pull their pants up after they got caught. I think it's comical that these people still believe they can say whatever they want in public, but then flip out if anyone quotes them. It also appears that the Snopes.com mafia has been called in to cast doubt upon the incident as conservatives have reported it. They call this claim a Mixture of true and false. Here's their lame...

"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.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Have you seen or heard the audio snippet of the actual author of Obamacare? His name is Jonathan Gruber. He is a professor at MIT, a professor of economics. He wrote both Romneycare and he wrote Obamacare. "Oh, yeah, he's a brilliant, smart guy! Oh, totally smart guy." Almost a year ago, in October of 2013, he was in Philadelphia speaking at the 24th Annual Health Economics Conference, and he spoke about Obamacare and how and what they had to do to make it a reality. I want you to listen to how this prominent Democrat, prominent...

In a video that surfaced on Friday, economist and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber said “lack of transparency” and “stupidity of the American voter” were “critical” to passing the president’s unpopular health care law. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber said. “Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever. But basically, that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.” Gruber added that he wished “we could make it all transparent,” but said the bill would not have passed if not for the administration’s art of deception on key features of the law. “This...

In a newly surfaced video, one of Obamacare’s architects admits a “lack of transparency” helped the Obama administration and congressional Democrats pass the Affordable Care Act. The conservative group American Commitment posted Jonathan Gruber’s remarks, reportedly from an Oct. 17, 2013, event, on YouTube. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” says the MIT economist who helped write Obamacare. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”