Jonathan Gruber, MIT Professor, Obamacare Architect, Income Bracket: 1%
Taxpayer funded health-care-consulting-fees: $5,886,150
$103,500 from the U.S. Department of State $392,000 from the state of Minnesota $392,600 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources $400,000 from the state of Vermont $400,000 from the state of Wisconsin $481,050 from the state of Michigan $1,730,000 from the U.S. Department of Justice (that medical hotbed) $2,050,000 from the U.S. National Institutes of Health
Current Status: Disavowed by Obama, Pelosi…
OBAMA STATEMENTS
“The fact that an adviser who was never on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with in terms of the voters is not a reflection on the actual process that was run,” Obama declared at a press conference here [11/16/2104], speaking for the first time about the comments by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber.
“You have already drawn some of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles, many of them I’ve stolen ideas from liberally, people ranging from Robert Gordon to Austan Goolsbee, Jon Gruber; my dear friend, Jim Wallis here, who can inform what are sometimes dry policy debates with a prophetic voice,” then-Senator Barack Obama said at the Brookings Institution in 2006.
Read more: Obama: We didn’t mislead on health care
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO [Congressional Budget Office] 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 said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass….Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.” JONATHAN GRUBER at Reason.com
Begins at around 31:15 mark in video.
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. [emphasis added]
- Law designed to manipulate a CBO score.
- Healthy would pay for sick purposely hidden.
- Gruber believes it is acceptable to deceive to achieve policy objective.
- Tax credits were a tool to force states into creating exchanges.
NANCY PELOSI ON JONATHAN GRUBER
STATEMENT: “I don’t know who he is. He didn’t help write our bill,” House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California claimed last Thursday. “So, let’s put him aside.” C-SPAN quickly excavated videotape on which Pelosi sang a totally different tune: “I don’t know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber of MIT’s analysis” of Obamacare, Pelosi said on November 5, 2009, as she publically serenaded his work.
JOHN KERRY ON JONATHAN GRUBER
STATEMENT: “According to Gruber, who has been our guide on a lot of this, it’s somewhere in the vicinity of an $8 billion cost.”
John Kerry discussing the “Cadillac Tax is 40% excise tax on health insurance plans.
Source: Jonathan Gruber: The $6 million Man
John Kerry Called Gruber ‘Our Guide On A Lot Of This’ [VIDEO]