The editors of the Chicago Tribune have published a harsh editorial condemning the responses of “defenders of Obamacare” to the remarks of Jonathan Gruber, the unquestioned architect of Massachusetts’s healthcare insurance reform plan who was lionized five years ago as a principle architect of the PPACA and is now something of a goat:
A 2013 video has Gruber in St. Louis describing how that “Cadillac tax” got into the ACA: “They proposed it and that passed, because the American people are too stupid to understand the difference.”
Gruber told MSNBC on Wednesday that his Pennsylvania comments were “at an academic conference” and “off-the-cuff”: “I basically spoke inappropriately and I regret having made those comments.”
No doubt because they’re true. Gruber hasn’t renounced a thing he said.
These deceptions are a world apart from the scuzzy but not atypical payoffs (the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase) that bought the final Senate votes to pass the ACA. Nor are we citing other sponsor claims that critics of the law also see as lies: that coverage really would be affordable, that the act would lower medical costs, that it would ease federal deficits. All debatable.
What’s not debatable is that Obamacare’s arc of deception is exposed — not unique, perhaps, but blatant and, thanks to our own eyes and Gruber’s words, provable: Obamacare, in order to function, had to break its backers’ promises. Also convincing: Gruber, recorded cautioning in 2012 that if states don’t set up their own insurance exchanges, “(your) citizens don’t get their tax credits.” That’s the very issue the U.S. Supreme Court now will litigate, perhaps to the functional downfall of Obamacare.
Defenders of Obamacare dismiss these revelations with three breezy retorts: We all knew how the law really would work. (No.) You gotta do what you gotta do. (No.) And this Gruber, he’s a nobody. This third excuse basked in absurdity Thursday: Pelosi dismissively said she didn’t know who Gruber is and that he didn’t help write the ACA, so, “Let’s put him aside.” Turns out she issued a 2009 news release touting “noted MIT health care economist Jonathan Gruber” whose modeling predicted “lower premiums than under current law for the millions of Americans using the newly-established Health Insurance Exchange.” Oh, and Pelosi also had discussed Gruber at a news conference.
The editors of the Trib have been increasingly opposed to the PPACA and that editorial is actually a pretty strong statement, at least by the standards of newspaper editorials these days.
I don’t have as much problem with what Dr. Gruber has said as some do. The fact is that the PPACA’s subsidies had to be portrayable as taxes to pass constitutional muster and to be politically acceptable.
The part that I find hard to swallow is the move to turn Dr. Gruber into an unperson. You should own your mistakes. And nowadays there’s no such thing as an anonymous remark or one that’s soon forgotten.
If you don’t want your past unfortunate statements to come back to haunt you, remain silent. That’s something that’s too much to expect of career politicians.
What I have a problem with is all of people who also knew what Gruber knew about the law and the way it was being deceptively sold, and had the gall to rebuke people for making the exact criticisms that we now know are true. It was obvious that the claims being made weren’t true but critics were told to STFU.
If supporters of ACA had responded to critics by saying, basically, “Yeah, I know this can’t possibly save tax revenue, lower consumer costs, and cover more people, but I still support it because I think increasing coverage is important,” I could deal with that. But don’t let them piss on our legs, tell us it’s raining champagne, and then denigrate us for recognizing it’s really urine and trying to wash it off.
What gobsmacks me is the number of presumably intelligent people who are denying not only did Dr. Gruber characterize the plaintiff’s stance in Halbig as the intent of the law contemporaneously with its enactment but so did the law’s primary Senate sponsor and both House and Senate leaders.
It looks like a fourth ( and undoubtedly not the last) tape has shown up.
As for this:
“I don’t have as much problem with what Dr. Gruber has said as some do. The fact is that the PPACA’s subsidies had to be portrayable as taxex to pass constitutional muster and to be politically acceptable.”
There is spin and advocacy, and then there is fraud or willful misconduct. Further, it’s galling that I would be subject to financial or criminal penalties by the SEC for doing the same thing.
It seems to me that scornful, but realistic, resignation is the proper observation, not an innocuous waving it off. That goes to character, and what I would expect of Reynolds or some of the crew at OTB along with other sycophants. So far the press’ reaction is clearly a dereliction of duty. As for Ms Pelosi, well.
As John Godfrey Saxe may have been the first to say, anyone who likes law or sausage shouldn’t watch them being made.
Even sausage making has to have some standards though. And the point of that adage is that the end product tastes good enough that you’re willing to overlook the process.
That’s one of those taste things I keep perseverating on. For some it’s absolutely delicious. For others not so much.
For me it’s sort of like that old wisecrack about Chinese food. They enacted the law and I immediately wanted healthcare reform.
“Wisecrack about Chinese” and I immediately thought, “You fuck like a Chinaman.” I’ve got crime noir on the brain again.
I don’t have as much of a problem of what Gruber has said (from what I’ve heard). The legislative process involves a lot of dissembling, starting with the titles. I also don’t think its unique to the particular problems with the PPACA’s passage, but anything that might raise taxes/fees or reduce benefits, etc.
But man this Gruber guy is a loose cannon. You don’t want this guy in your secret clubhouse.
What about this guy:
“Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) slammed the administration’s ObamaCare rollout, calling President Obama’s claim that people could keep their insurance plans under the law a “lie.â€
“The rollout was so bad, and I was appalled — I don’t understand how the president could have sat there and not been checking on that on a weekly basis,” Frank said in an interview with the Huffington Post published Friday.
But frankly, he should never have said as much as he did, that if you like your current health care plan, you can keep it,†he continued. “That wasn’t true. And you shouldn’t lie to people. And they just lied to people.—
Gruber is a consultant with duties to whomever was paying him. But Frank, isn’t what he is saying worse? He can pee on Obama on the way out the door, but he didn’t have any public responsibilities?
I remember clips being played showing Mike Enzi giving head’s up warnings about the grandfather rule, which were summarily rebuked and voted down by the dems.
Other republicans also voiced their concerns about the PPACA, including the onerous length and complexity of the bill, itself. Now we have Gruber admitting it was deliberately written in “torturous” language to confuse the CBO in their analysis and scoring of it, because if the mandate had been seen as a tax it would have failed. So, instead of tightening up the bill to make it work better for the people, it was convoluted and lied about in order to pass mustard, without being intercepted for being a badly put together piece of legislation.
There is so much political garbage surrounding this bill — before, during and now after it’s deceptive passage. Gruber’s comments only add further validation to what republicans and others were cautioning the public about.
Rep Barney Frank … public responsibilities
I am going to take a break on this one. Well, almost.
As long as we do not count Fannie, Freddie, or the credit creation that lead to the financial collapse, he is a perfect angel, but why bother about a few trillion dollars of worthless debt. He sure ain’t.
“Loose cannon”
Yes.
What Gruber said wasn’t shocking to anyone who was paying attention at the time- it was obvious that was what they were doing (rigging the CBO scoring, for example.)
What is a bit shocking is that he was going around running his mouth about it.
Just came across this:
http://m.firedoglake.com/firedoglake/#!/entry/125-responses-to-how-the-white-house-used-jonathan-grubers,54626f5be56d0bb853695810
This backstory seems much more significant for the lack of disclosure. I never caught it at the time but apparently the were parading Gruber around as an independent analyst when he was actually contracted to create the justifications. Pretty unseemly, and as I think Guarneri mentioned in another thread, it would be illegal in a lot of private sector situations.
Yet a 6th video was uncovered by and shown on by CNN’s Jake Tapper.
In it Gruber explains the usage of first mislabeling the PPACA as a tax on insurance plans, rather than what it really was, a tax on the people. The second distortion was explained as a late-start-up component of the tax, giving time to cement in it’s implementation before the true brunt of it’s cost was felt by the unsuspecting public.
It reminds me of the Spider and Fly kind of enticement, where once the fly is coaxed into the web the spider is able to ensnare him for the kill. So it seems was the economical rational behind the PPACA.
A Kinsey gaffe. All bills are written so that the CBO will score them well. No surprise there. Also, everyone in the health care policy world understood that it would transfer money from the healthy to the sick. That is what insurance does. There are plenty of articles in the WSJ and NYT from 2009 noting that would happen. If it wasn’t transparent it was because people weren’t looking. (See Cowen.) Finally, it is always in bad taste to call people stupid. However, that is not particularly unusual for an economist, in my experience.
(Written so that the CBO couldn’t understand it? Really? What else do they have to do? I am sure that from his POV it was torturous. AFAICT, it was just written to provide the best estimates of revenue and spending.
Steve
Gruber doesn’t seem to be a slouch in economics. In fact he is well versed in the working parts of the PPACA law and their real life implications and impact on the people effected by it. However, unfittingly, his ego appears to be heavily invested in being a well paid consultant and futuristic voyeur into the accuracy of his predictions, without having any conscionable engagement as to how principled the means were, in his HC plan, in meeting the ultimate goals of the PPACA.
All bills are written so that the CBO will score them well
Not disagreeing, but it seems to me that the gamesmanship on that keeps getting worse to the point that the scoring is almost meaningless.
Keep in mind that the CBO operates at the will of Congress. It produces the results that the Congress wants on the things that the Congress wants them to.
“All bills are written so that the CBO will score them well. No surprise there.”
All true, which is a point Dave and others (like me) made many times over the years. Didn’t seem to stop the grandiose claims about the PPACA reducing the deficit – claims we don’t hear made much anymore.
Gruber is emblematic of the Elite douchebags that run this country. The only shock is seeing one of them brag about it multiple times on video. The fact that he was paid by the government while being described as an independent analyst isn’t surprising either.
Again, the issue I have is the ends-justify-the-means attitude. I realize that politics is politics, but very few stones were left unturned to get the PPACA passed.
The CBO still predicts that the insurance program will cut deficits. They, along with others have noted that the slowing in health care costs will help. If you read conservative health care policy folks one of their concerns is that if Obamacare is not repealed soon, they will have to find ways to make up for the increased debt caused by its repeal.
Steve
steve,
I don’t think the CBO updated their projections recently, but their earlier projections depend on a number of bad assumptions. Once you account for the loss of revenue from the employer penalty (unlikely to be implemented), the medical device tax (likely to be repealed), Cadillac tax (certainly on the table for repeal), etc. then he deficit reduction goes out the window. Also, the architect of the law stated the law was written to get a politically acceptable CBO estimate – in other words (as Dave pointed out many times), the law is design to game the CBO models and mandated assumptions.
The CBO also makes questionable assumptions about the laws effects – for example, they project the PPACA will reduce the number of people with employer-provided insurance and assume that those people’s income represented by nontaxable benefits will shrink and be offset with an increase in taxable wages which will result in more federal revenue. That estimate alone is supposed to , IIRC, bring in about $200 billion in extra revenue over the next decade. Personally, I’m skeptical. Most of the savings that allow the law to supposedly reduce the deficit come from those kinds of estimates of secondary and tertiary effects – the actual net cost of the PPACA’s actual provisions will be about a $trillion over the next decade and that’s assuming the law’s revenue generating features remain in place.
Also, I don’t really care about the political concerns of conservative health policy folks.
In addition the primary strategies for cost control/reduction in the law are either problematic or on the rocks or both. The two most significant strategies were electronic recordkeeping (always a will o’ the wisp) and the IPAB.
Electronic recordkeeping will probably end up costing more than it will save. I could probably write a whole blog let alone a post on the problems with electronic medical recordkeeping. Suffice it to say that for it work it would have needed to work in the opposite direction that it has. The federal government would have needed to furnish a system. But we know how federal IT projects go.
The IPAB is in the crosshairs for repeal. It’s never been popular and it’s hard to explain how it will work that doesn’t sound like it marries the worst features of the Federal Reserve Board and the Post Office.