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.
