Tags

, , , , ,

GruberGaze, gentle readers, on the face of the Obama Administration. There you will see the epitome of the self-imagined moral and intellectual elite. He is a man that attended the right schools and has the right credentials. He is an academic at one of America’s elite universities: MIT. He is a man whose only desire is to make a more perfect world for the good of the people, people too stupid to understand what is good for them, and people to whom the elite must lie to create that greater good, lest the ungrateful and mentally defective people resist what is in their best interests.

In other words, he is a lying, dishonorable, arrogant, sanctimonious hypocrit and would-be despot. Par for the Obama Administration course, to use an Obamite analogy. His name is Jonathan Gruber.

Oh yes: he was paid a bit less than $400,000 dollars to design a law he, President Obama, all of them, knew was a lie that the American people would never accept. He was paid to lie and to tell others how to lie, to cheat and harm his fellow Americans.

And why is Dr. Gruber a liar and what is the scope of his deception? Keith Hennessey.com has the story: 

MIT Economist Dr. Jonathan Gruber, widely cited as ‘the architect of ObamaCare,’ recently committed a Kinsley gaffe, ‘when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.’

‘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 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. It’s a second-best argument. Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.

Summary: The architect of Obamacare knowing lied–the entire Obcama Administration including the President lied and continue to lie–to get Obamacare passed. Transparency? Not if it endangered Obamacare. Everything they said about it, including “the,” “and,” and “a,” was a lie, and they’ve lied to the courts and the Congress to try to keep Obamacare afloat.

By all means, take the link and read Hennessey’s entire article, which points out just how damaging Obamacare has been and is. He continues:

Apparently Dr. Gruber thinks it’s OK to lie to American voters when his allies are in power to enact policies that he wants but the voters wouldn’t. He then says American voters are ‘stupid’ both for not agreeing with his value choices and for not figuring out the deception.

I disagree.

When you strip away all the complexity, economic policy is ultimately an expression of elected officials making difficult value choices. If over time these officials make value choices that do not reflect the values of the people whom they represent, they can, should, and will be replaced.

When these same elected officials, and those who advise them, deliberately construct policies to hide value choices that would be unpopular were they transparent and explicit, we end up with two terrible outcomes. We get policies that do not reflect our values, and we re-elect representatives who are lying to us.

Gruber’s lies–there are more; keep reading–take on new significance because the fate of Obamacare once again hangs on the Supreme Court, and perhaps, again, the Chief Justice’s willingness to twist the law and reason into a pretzel to save it. TaxProfBlog has the story:

Friday the Supreme Court granted certiorari in King v. Burwell, one of four pending challenges to the IRS rule authorizing tax credits and cost-sharing subsidies for the purchase of health insurance in federally established exchanges. …

With this grant, the Court has the opportunity to reaffirm the principle that the law is what Congress enacts, not what the administration or others wish Congress had enacted with the benefit of hindsight. Granting tax credits to those who need help purchasing health insurance may be a good idea, and may have bipartisan support, but the IRS lacks the authority to authorize such tax credits where Congress failed to do so. The PPACA only authorizes tax credits for the purchase of insurance on exchanges ‘established by the State.

The Affordable Care Act plainly says that federal subsidies–tax credits–are available only to people that purchase their insurance on state exchanges, not federal exchanges. Most states have refused to establish exchanges, and the Obamites have been handing out subsidies anyway, claiming the clear language of the law must be ignored because surely Congress meant to give subsidies to everyone regardless of the actual language they wrote in the statute.

The point, and Gruber will be helping–very much against his will and the will of the Obamites–to make it for the Supreme Court, is that Congress meant exactly what they wrote, and lied about it to cover it up. Of course the idiots in Congress didn’t actually read the thing before they voted for it. Nancy Pelosi was absolutely right, we really did need to pass the bill to find out what was in it, because they were never going to tell us the truth before the vote.

Gruber lied before the Congress, claiming the subsidy language was a “typo,” and he and the Congress never intended what they wrote to be interpreted as what they wrote. Why did they write “no subsidies except on state established exchanges”? They wanted to dangle subsidies–and other financial treats–as a means of enticing the states to establish exchanges. Supposedly super smart people weren’t nearly smart enough to foresee that most of the states wouldn’t bite, and their arrogance was set in legislative concrete for all to see. Oops.

Gruber, as you probably know, was a paid technical advisor to the Department of Health and Human Services and an informal advisor to Democrats in Congress. He was also an architect of the Massachusetts reforms, signed into law by then-Governor Mitt Romney, that served more or less as the Affordable Care Act’s prototype. The comments from 2012 came during a question-and-answer session, following a lecture he gave at a non-profit research group based outside of Washington. Here’s the key excerpt:

Questioner: You mentioned the health-information [sic] Exchanges for the states, and it is my understanding that if states don’t provide them, then the federal government will provide them for the states.

Gruber: Yeah, so these health-insurance Exchanges, you can go on ma.healthconnector.org and see ours in Massachusetts, will be these new shopping places and they’ll be the place that people go to get their subsidies for health insurance. In the law, it says if the states don’t provide them, the federal backstop will. The federal government has been sort of slow in putting out its backstop, I think partly because they want to sort of squeeze the states to do it. I think 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’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, and that they’ll do it. But you know, once again, the politics can get ugly around this.

Not nearly as ugly as Gruber’s lies will, in short order, get.

Jonathan Cohn The New Republic also chronicled Gruber’s deceptions:

Ryan Radia of the Competitive Enterprise Institute published the video, with credit to Rich Weinstein, a commenter at the Volokh Conspiracy blog. Their find is getting a lot of attention—and appropriately so. Among those highlighting it is the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon, the individual who’s done more than anybody to craft and advance these lawsuits—which, if successful, could mean that millions of people in states like Florida and Texas would lose the hundreds or even thousands of dollars in tax credits that now make it possible for them to buy health insurance. [skip]

So, what gives? Gruber, in between sessions at a conference in which he’s participating today, told me the following:

‘I honestly don’t remember why I said that. I was speaking off-the-cuff. It was just a mistake. People make mistakes. Congress made a mistake drafting the law and I made a mistake talking about it.

During this era, at this time, the federal government was trying to encourage as many states as possible to set up their exchanges. …

At this time, there was also substantial uncertainty about whether the federal backstop would be ready on time for 2014. I might have been thinking that if the federal backstop wasn’t ready by 2014, and states hadn’t set up their own exchange, there was a risk that citizens couldn’t get the tax credits right away. …

But there was never any intention to literally withhold money, to withhold tax credits, from the states that didn’t take that step. That’s clear in the intent of the law and if you talk to anybody who worked on the law. My subsequent statement was just a speak-o—you know, like a typo.

There are few people who worked as closely with Obama administration and Congress as I did, and at no point was it ever even implied that there’d be differential tax credits based on whether the states set up their own exchange. And that was the basis of all the modeling I did, and that was the basis of any sensible analysis of this law that’s been done by any expert, left and right.

I didn’t assume every state would set up its own exchanges but I assumed that subsidies would be available in every state. It was never contemplated by anybody who modeled or worked on this law that availability of subsides would be conditional of who ran the exchanges.

So Gruber tells us he misspoke and never believed what he was saying. Everybody knew that, all the Obamacare advocates never believed him either. Cohn continues:

What do I think? As I’ve written before, I had literally hundreds of conversations with the people writing health care legislation in 2009 and 2010, including quite a few with Gruber. Like other journalists who were following the process closely, I never heard any of them suggest subsidies would not be available in states where officials decided not to operate their own marketplaces—a big deal that, surely, would have come up in conversation.

So if Gruber misspoke, if he had no idea what he was saying or why he was saying it, it must have happened only once, right? Not so fast…

John Sexton of Breitbart has an audio recording of Gruber saying the same thing—also in January, 2012, but at a different venue. You can listen to it here.

Now that these particular chickens are coming home to roost, Gruber is spinning like a top once again. The Washington Post reports (on November 11, 2014): 

An MIT professor who was an architect of Obamacare said Tuesday he ‘spoke inappropriately’ when he said a lack of transparency and ‘the stupidity of American voter’ played a key part in the law’s passage.

‘The comments in the video were made at an academic conference,’ Jonathan Gruber said Tuesday on MSNBC. ‘I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately and I regret having made those comments.

Oh, well, as long as he spoke inappropriately and it was at an academic conference, it’s OK then. All is forgiven.

Notice, gentle readers, the utter contempt in which Gruber and his kind hold Americans. He didn’t apologize for calling Americans stupid or for lying to them, he only owned up to speaking “inappropriately.”

For a man with a doctorate, he has a rather poor grasp of vocabulary. One speaks inappropriately is saying things not fitting to a given situation or occasion. Speaking inappropriately is when one tells a fart joke at a funeral, or tells a man in a wheelchair to “stand up, let the people see you!”  Oops. That was Vice President Joe Biden. Sorry.

Calling hundreds of millions “stupid,” and lying to them to force down their throats a law that not only causes millions to lose their health insurance, but that enormously raises premiums and deductibles, and drastically reduces the availability of medical care is a bit more serious than a verbal gaffe or a “typo.” That’s the kind of thing that requires not only a sincere and humble apology, it requires repeal of the law.

But Professor Gruber doesn’t do sincere and humble, nor do President Obama, congressional Democrats, or the Obama Administration and its legions of faceless, conscienceless bureaucrats. They’re morally perfect and so much smarter than the rest of us, they’re beyond sincerity and humility, above it. As Mr. Obama has often said, we should be thanking them.

And is Gruber really suggesting that one can say grotesquely offensive, crude, false and ugly things, just so long as they’re said at academic conferences? What kinds of people attend those things anyway? Oh yes: progressives. I’ve attended academic conferences. Most of the people there don’t do sincerity or humility either, and they think we’re stupid. Who is “we”? Sincere, humble people that don’t attend academic conferences.

But at least he regrets “having made those comments.” I’ll bet he does, but not nearly as much as he will. Jonathan Gruber made the worst mistake someone pretending to be a human being with a conscience like him can make: he accidently told the truth–about himself.

UPDATE (Pre-Publication):  In the few hours between my first draft of this article and my final posting and proof reading, a third video of Gruber demonstrating his contempt for the American people and his willingness to lie to harm them, has surfaced.  CNN has the story:

A third video emerged Wednesday of MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, insulting voters and suggesting their ignorance was exploited by those pushing passage of the health care law.

Neither the White House nor Gruber would comment.

In this one, Gruber was discussing how then-Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, pushed forward a way to add a tax on expensive health insurance plans, or ‘Cadillac Plans,’ that would purportedly tax the insurance companies though Gruber suggests everyone knew the companies would just pass on the additional cost to customers.

Your federal government paid this ivy-covered thug a huge amount of money to cheat and hurt you.