Monday, November 17, 2014

Gruber: Obama personally asked me to help disguise unhelpful Obamacare facts

◼ That’s not quite his verbatim quote, but it’s pretty darn close: - Guy Benson/HotAir



“The problem is it’s a political nightmare, and people say ‘no, you can’t tax my benefits’…so what we did a lot in that room was think a lot about well how could we make this work? … And [Obama] is really a realistic guy. He was like, ‘look, I can’t just do this.’ He said ‘it’s just not going to happen politically. The bill will not pass. How do we manage to get there through phase-ins and other things?’ And we talked about it. He was just very interested in that topic.”

And why was Obama so keen on obscuring the nature of his signature law’s taxes? Perhaps because he’d just recently spent months relentlessly hammering John McCain over a proposal to tax health benefits “for the first time.” So he needed MacGruber to swoop in and help craft a strategy of evasion and deflection.



◼ Obama Encouraged Us to ‘Pull Every Clip’ On Obamacare So We Did - Washington Free Beacon
Indeed. From the promise of keeping your plan to keeping your doctor to lowering premiums to no new impositions on the middle class, there are a lot of clips to show the administration was anything but transparent in getting the Affordable Care Act passed and signed into law.

◼ Grubergate shines spotlight on Obamacare profiteers - Byron York/Washington Examiner @ByronYork
◼ Obama claims Obamacare ´not deceptively marketed´ - Ed Lasky/American Thinker
◼ Obama on Gruber: I Just Heard About This Today - Pam Key/Breitbart TV
◼ Obama Just Stepped In A Pile Of Gruber - Dan Riehl/Breitbart Instablog



◼ UH OH: Obama: ’Like Your Plan, Keep Your Plan.’ Gruber, 2009: ‘Five Million People Will Lose Their Plan’ - David Steinberg/PJMedia

Said Obama:
I would just advise every press outlet here: Pull up every clip and every story. I think it’s fair to say there was not a provision in the health care law that was not extensively debated and was fully transparent … It was a tough debate.
As noted by Politico (above link), Obama’s statement regarding deception neglects that he already has admitted his frequent claims that Americans would not lose preexisting plans under Obamacare to have been a mistake. Politifact went so far as to label Obama’s “if you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan” as its “Lie Of The Year”.

...On April 8, 2010, Jonathan Gruber himself cited his “Gruber analysis” in a memo released by the Center for American Progress. His memo was written as a defense of the necessity of the “individual mandate,” the requirement that all Americans must purchase health insurance or pay a fine. He referred to the “Gruber microsimulation model,” his model that produced the results Pelosi touted in the 2009 interview.

Wrote Gruber:
What would happen if we repealed the mandate?

Some critics have suggested repealing the mandate embedded in the PPACA, while retaining most of its more “popular” provisions. But such a policy would be disastrous for both the cost of insurance and the number of people covered.

I have developed the Gruber microsimulation model to estimate how health reforms would affect insurance markets; this is a very similar model to the one the Congressional Budget Office used to score the PPACA, and my model derives very similar to CBO. I can use this model to consider what would happen if Congress removed the mandate while keeping all other aspects of the law intact. I find that:

▪ Total insurance coverage would rise by fewer than 10 million persons rather than the 32 million persons estimated by CBO. The number of uninsured would be reduced by less than 20 percent rather than by about two-thirds.

▪ Employer-sponsored insurance, which is projected to erode by about 5 million persons under reform, would instead erode by over 20 million persons.

▪ The fully implemented cost of the legislation in 2019 would fall by only about 20 percent—we would spend 80 percent as much to cover fewer than one-third as many people.

Those who do not obtain coverage would be the healthiest individuals, causing enormous adverse selection in insurance markets. The average individual premium in the exchange would rise by about 40 percent without the mandate.


◼ Obama-I've Stolen Ideas From Ideas From Jon Gruber Liberally

Some of you may be tired of all the Jonathan Gruber videos so here's something a bit different, Barack Obama talking about Gruber when he was a Senator in 2006. Way before this weekend when he was distancing himself from the MIT professor--he was bragging about stealing Gruber's Ideas.
"You have already drawn some of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles, many of them I have 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."




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