[COMMENTARY] The White House’s Latest ObamaCare Lie

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was pitched and eventually sold to the American public on a foundation of lies. Many of the most egregious examples of the calculated mendacity of ObamaCare’s designers were exposed by the law’s very implementation, but a few of its more subtle deceptions and the duplicity of the law’s authors was revealed in a series of videos featuring the refreshingly honest Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and health care policy advisor Jonathan Gruber. It is fitting that, just days before the Supreme Court issues what might be its most far-reaching verdict regarding the ACA’s fraudulence, Gruber is again in the news.

As soon as the Affordable Care Act was implemented and revealed its hideous, multifarious visage to the public, the lies at the heart of the law became apparent even to observers committed to ensuring its success.

Premiums rose both for those on and off Affordable Care Act-related plans. Patients began losing their cherished and long-patronized doctors. The Supreme Court virtually rewrote the law when it ignored the administration and the solicitor general when it determined that the government had no right to penalize the public for failing to purchase health insurance. None of this would have come as a surprise to anyone who attended one of Gruber’s many lectures.

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” the health care policy advisor conceded, because “if CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.”

As for the substance of the case the Court will rule on before the end of the month in King v. Burwell, Gruber appeared to validate the claims of those who believe the law was intentionally crafted to deny states the subsidies they presently enjoy if they did not set up a state-run insurance exchange. “There’s a lot of responsibilities on the states to set up these exchanges, like we did in Massachusetts, to regulate them and run them,” Gruber insisted in 2011. “Will people understand that, gee, if your governor doesn’t set up an exchange, you’re losing hundreds of millions of dollars of tax credits to be delivered to your citizens?”

Via: Commentary Magazine

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CONFIRMED: WHITE HOUSE LIED ABOUT JONATHAN GRUBER’S ROLE IN DEVELOPING OBAMACARE

The Associated Press

President Obama’s dismissal of MIT’s Jonathan Gruber as just “some adviser” he barely remembers, rather than a key architect of ObamaCare, has always been one of the flimsiest and most transparent lies told by this profoundly dishonest White House.

Everyone knew Gruber was critical to ObamaCare, and when he was caught on tape high-fiving himself for helping to fool what he described as “stupid” American voters with the Affordable Care Act’s web of false promises and ludicrous projections, he was speaking from the Administration’s heart.

It’s still newsworthy that the House Oversight Committee has released emails to the Wall Street Journal showing Gruber had a far closer working relationship with the White House than it wanted to admit:

The emails show frequent consultations between Mr. Gruber and top Obama administration staffers and advisers in the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services on the Affordable Care Act. They show he informed HHS about interviews with reporters and discussions with lawmakers, and he consulted with HHS about how to publicly describe his role.

[…] “His proximity to HHS and the White House was a whole lot tighter than they admitted,” said 

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT)

80%

 (R., Utah), chairman of the House oversight committee. “There’s no doubt he was a much more integral part of this than they’ve said. He put up this facade he was an arm’s length away. It was a farce.”

Mr. Chaffetz on Sunday sent a letter to HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell requesting information justifying the department’s sole-source contract with Mr. Gruber for his work on the health law.

Good luck with that, Rep. Chaffetz.  At the rate this Administration responds to congressional and public inquiries, you’ll be getting the answer to your letter sometime in 2018.

Via: Breitbart

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[VIDEO] MIT Economist Jonathan Gruber Had Bigger Role in ObamaCare Than Previously Believed, Emails Show

The ObamaCare consultant who once mocked the “stupidity of the American voter” had a bigger impact on the healthcare law than previously known, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.

Jonathan Gruber frequently contacted Obama administration officials via email while crafting ObamaCare, according to the newspaper.

The Journal said that previously unreleased messages show that Gruber repeatedly messaged the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) between January, 2009 and March, 2010.

He offered advice on healthcare policy and informed officials about media and lawmaker interviews concerning ObamaCare, the report added.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told the newspaper that the communications disprove Gruber’s past assertions that he was a limited participant in creating the healthcare law.

The House Oversight Committee chairman added that his committee had obtained 20,000 pages emails after working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Gruber is an economist.

“His proximity to HHS and the White House was a whole lot tighter than they admitted,” Chaffetz said of Gruber’s relationship with the Obama administration, according to the Journal.

“There’s no doubt he was a much more integral part of this than they’ve said,” he added.

Chaffetz also said on Sunday he has sent HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell a letter for additional information over Gruber’s contract with her agency.

Outrage erupted last year when video footage emerged of Gruber insulting the American electorate over ObamaCare.

He was filmed in 2013 reportedly praising “the stupidity of the American voter” for helping pass President Obama’s sweeping healthcare reform law.

Via: The Hill

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The Disappearance of Jonathan Gruber

No one lectures the United States Supreme Court quite like the New York Times. Their penchant for talking down to (face it) the conservative members of the court has transcended numerous personnel changes at the paper. And when it comes to the issues that define the twilight of modern liberalism, the Times does not obsess (as other, lesser news organizations might) about the distinction between news and opinion pages

A recent article by Robert Pear in the Politics section provides a priceless example. TheTimes recognizes, of course, that Obamacare represents the high water mark of statist ideology in the past 100 years of the U.S. Congress and that, should the law be forced back to Capitol Hill for repair of one sort or another, it has no chance at survival. As I have written elsewhere, the liberal cognoscenti view their task as pushing forward the great ratchet of history to lift us, the barbarians, out of chaos and onto the plateau of utopia.

Nothing is more agonizing to them than to see the ratchet slip a hard-won notch.

So the Times does what is necessary to inform the Court of how and why the correct decision in King v. Burwell, the latest challenge to Obamacare, is to preserve the law untouched.

In this case, as most everyone knows by now, the challenge to the law is actually directed at the IRS and their policy of providing subsidies to purchasers of health insurance in states where the government has decided not to set up an insurance exchange (leaving the task to the feds). As presented in Reason Magazine:

One section of the Affordable Care Act stipulates that insurance subsidies shall be provided in any exchange “established by the State.” Federal exchanges are not established by the state. Therefore, the federal government cannot subsidize policies bought on exchanges in the two-thirds of states that did not set up their own exchange. Washington has been doing just that up to now, thanks to the IRS’ contested interpretation of the law.

Via: Ricochet

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[VIDEO] Jonathan Gruber Glaringly Absent From NYT Article on Obamacare Wording 'Mistake'

Say my name. ---Walter White aka Heisenberg in Breaking Bad. New York Times writer Robert Pear  knows his name but he didn't say it in his article about how four words in the Obamacare law was simply a mistake. Pear quotes a number of people involved in the law's writing process but fails to mention the one who was acknowledged as the architect of Obamacare...until it became politically inconvenient to do so---Jonathan Gruber. And the reason why Gruber's name went unmentioned in the article is because of his claim, recorded for all eternity on video, that only state established health exchanges would be eligible for subsidies. -

.Let us now watch Pear make his case in his Gruber-free zone that it was all just a mistake:

WASHINGTON — They are only four words in a 900-page law: “established by the state.”

But it is in the ambiguity of those four words in the Affordable Care Act that opponents found a path to challenge the law, all the way to the Supreme Court.

How those words became the most contentious part of President Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment has been a mystery. Who wrote them, and why? Were they really intended, as the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell claim, to make the tax subsidies in the law available only in states that established their own health insurance marketplaces, and not in the three dozen states with federal exchanges?

Who wrote them, Pear? You know the name of the most prominent of the writers. Say his name. Saaaaay it!!! Okay, since you won't say his name, let us watch Obamacare Jonathan Gruber himself explain how the subsidies work and who gets them:

What’s important to remember politically about this is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits—but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying [to] your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that that’s a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges. But, you know, once again the politics can get ugly around this.

Via: Newsbusters

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The Obamacare Prediction of the Week

There’s been quite a buzz over Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article in which MIT economist Jonathan Gruber claims that, although a modest number of Americans may see their health insurance policies change under Obamacare, only 3% of the population will be hurt financially by that change.

Of course, 3% is more than “none.” It’s also very different from another of Obama’s statements, that a typical family will save $2,500, which Obama “promised” repeatedly (with his fingers crossed, as it turns out).

Still, it’s nowhere near as bad as Obamacare’s critics — and many recent horror stories told by recipients of policy cancellations — would suggest. But is Gruber’s prediction correct?

Not being a number-crunching economist, I can’t tell you. What I can say is that these predictions of Gruber’s have been critiqued and described in a Business Insider article by Josh Barro as “garbage,” and that Barro is otherwise known as “Obama’s favorite conservative columnist,” whatever that might mean.

In most of the articles I’ve seen so far about these projections, Gruber is touted as having been the main architect of Romneycare. This is true. But it also makes it sound as though he might be a Republican, which is most definitely not the case. Gruber is an extremely partisan Democrat and not the least bit shy about it, as can be seen from this month-old Esquire interview with him.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that Gruber’s not correct about what he’s predicting. It just means, let’s say, that his loyalties lie on the side of Obamacare.

There’s another personal reason that Gruber might be eager to see Obamacare succeed: he not only was Romneycare’s architect, he was Obamacare’s architect as well. What’s more, he was instrumental in making sanguine predictions about how much money Obamacare would end up saving people, projections Congress relied on heavily in soothing its own anxieties and passing the bill. And so he is invested in validating his own past predictions as well.

Via: PJ Media

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Obamacare 2013: Now Playing At A State Capitol Near You

If elected, Mitt Romney vows to “end” it.

If re-elected, Barack Obama says he’s “open to amending” it.

But regardless of who wins the presidency next month, conscientious voters need to know this: Obamacare is already costing taxpayers lots o fmoney, and within the next few months it will cost millions of dollars more.

It’s bad enough that President Obama’s “if you like your Doctor, you can keep your Doctor” promise has proven false.  And it’s bad enough that his promise to “bend the healthcare cost curve downward” has proven to be fictitious, as well (according to MIT Economist Jonathan Gruber prices for private insurance will likely increase 30% by 2016 – this, despite Gruber’s support of the President’s claims in 2009).

Now, state governments are spending taxpayer-funded time and resources figuring out how to comply with the federal mandates. The Obamacare law has imposed a deadline of November 16th, whereby the states must explain to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services what they intend to do about the establishment of their respective “healthcare exchanges” - the government organized group of standardized health insurance plans from which citizens private citizens and organizations will be permitted to purchase health plans – and the states are deciding now how to proceed.

Via: Canada Free Press

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