Gruber

Dear Democrats, don’t even think about trying to run away from him.

[Afternoon update]

The epic search of Diogenes for an honest man is over.

[Update a few minutes later]

It gets worse:

I think we’d probably like to get rid of the tax exempt status for health care benefits.

Note that McCain proposed doing just that in the 2008 election. His idea was that we would get rid of this exemption and instead give people an additional tax credit valued at the average cost of health insurance. Thus, people would be held harmless by the change, but we’d get rid of this government-made distortion in how employers pay their employees.

Barack Obama, get this, demagogued that plan and accused McCain of wanting to increase taxes on people.

And meanwhile, he schemed to achieve the same thing, except without that part about giving people an additional tax credit which would offset increased taxes, and, get this, without telling people he was getting rid of the tax exemption.

Once again — subverting democracy by completely destroying the concept of Consent of the Governed.

All in a day’s work.

[Update a while later]

Obama himself was leading the discussion of how to take away the tax benefits.

42 thoughts on “Gruber”

  1. Seems the usual suspects have yet to receive their talking points from the DNC. I’m sure they’ll be along shortly to tell us how Gruber didn’t really mean what he said or how he’s some minor character who should be completely ignored. Or, perhaps they’ll not be so lazy and come up with some other more creative excuse. Should be fun to watch.

  2. As Congress voted on the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, in 2010, one of the bill’s architects, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, told a college audience that those pushing the legislation pitched it as a bill that would control spiraling health care costs even though most of the bill was focused on something else and there was no guarantee the bill would actually bend the cost curve.

    http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/13/politics/tapper-gruber/

    Funny, there’s a kool-aid drinker around claiming that the bill was intended to control costs…

    1. It included a number of features intended to control costs, but that goal was secondary to expanding coverage. As Gruber puts it at your link, “the bill that they made is 90% health insurance coverage and 10% about cost control.”

          1. The actual full name is “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”. Patient Protection, i.e. making sure that everyone has access to health coverage, comes first.

      1. … and there was no guarantee the bill would actually bend the cost curve.

        I think you missed this part, too.

        1. Oh, but it will bend the cost curve…up. It’s like the multiplier effect of government spending being a number less than one. For those stupid enough to vote for Obama hoping for “change”, they should realize that not all change is for the better.

        2. That’s right, there was no guarantee that the cost-control provisions would work. The CBO wasn’t convinced, and conservatively scored the bill as if they wouldn’t. Fortunately they, and/or something else, is working, and health care cost growth has dropped since 2010.

      2. “It included a number of features intended to control costs, but that goal was secondary to expanding coverage”

        The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution contained many features related to national security.
        And, come to think of it, was also put forward by a Democratic President. How little things change.

      3. It included a number of features intended to control costs

        And the law includes a number of features that inflate costs. And that may be by someone’s intent as well. My view is that the cost inflating portions will defeat the cost controlling portions.

          1. Too bad, the year 2014 is not the end of time. The future will come. IMHO ten years will see the fall of Obamacare. There are too many consumers of health care and too many insurers insulated from the consequences of their actions.

          2. It is also true that the future will bring some of the law’s cost-control features into effect (e.g. the Cadillac tax). And if it’s clear that cost-control provisions aren’t working, they could be strengthened or replaced, assuming we ever again have a Congress and White House that can pass legislation.

          3. And it could be much longer than that. The Dems don’t expect to have a shot at the House majority until 2020; if they hold the White House in 2016 that’s at least another 6 years of divided government.

          4. It would be almost unprecedented, historically, for the Dems to retain the White House in 2016. It probably will be another 2008, just substitute “Obama” for “Bush.”

          5. It could be, if we have another economic collapse between now and election day. If we don’t, and the economy continues on its slow upward climb, and Clinton’s health is good, she’ll be in better shape than George H.W. Bush in 1988 or Al Gore in 2000.

  3. subverting democracy by completely destroying the concept of Consent of the Governed

    People are shocked, shocked to discover that politicians spin the truth to put their proposals in a positive light, and their opponents’ proposals in a negative light. Alert Madison: clearly self-government is impossible.

    Yes, Obama’s 2008 campaign dishonestly attacked McCain’s plan as the largest middle class tax hike in U.S. history (there were fair criticisms to be made of the plan, but that wasn’t one of them). And the McCain campaign matched them step for step, dishonestly claiming that Obama’s plan “will rob 50 million employees of their health coverage” (again, there were fair criticisms to be made, and that wasn’t one of them).

    As in every election, the voters had to pick through the dishonesty and hyperbole coming from both sides, and make a choice. As Churchill observed, it’s the worst system of government, except for all the others.

    1. Um Jim… in 2009, Obama had already won the election. Why was he lying then? He was under oath to the American people by 2009.

      1. In 2011 Paul Ryan had won re-election to the House, and was “under oath to the American people”. That didn’t stop him from dishonestly presenting his Medicare reform plan (part of the Ryan budget, which passed the House multiple times) as having no effect on anyone over 55 at the time of passage. Why? Because he wanted his plan to be popular, and knew that telling senior citizens that his plan would gut their health coverage would work against that goal. The gap between Ryan’s rhetoric and reality was as gaping as anything anyone said in favor of Obamacare.

        Do you really think that Democrats are the only politicians who put their proposals in the most flattering light available?

    2. Let’s compare “lies”. More Americans will die from illnesses after being kicked off their formerly affordable health care coverage under Obamacare (which passed without a single GOP vote in congress) than have died under all of Bush’s wars (which passed with overwhelming Dem support in congress). Voters will not forget this.

      1. Obamacare has greatly increased the number of Americans with health coverage. If you think not having coverage causes deaths, Obamacare is saving lives, and repealing Obamacare would cost lives.

    3. And the McCain campaign matched them step for step, dishonestly claiming that Obama’s plan “will rob 50 million employees of their health coverage” (again, there were fair criticisms to be made, and that wasn’t one of them).

      So why wasn’t this a “fair criticism”? One of the observations that Gruber made is that health insurance costs continue to rise faster than the CPI-indexed threshold for the “Cadillac tax”. He apparently interpreted this as an effective way to end employer-based health insurance. I imagine that would affect 50 million employees and their families.

      I notice a tendency for inconvenient criticisms to be somehow “unfair”.

      1. “He apparently interpreted this as an effective way to end employer-based health insurance.”
        Which was and still is a major goal of theirs…the large and necessary step towards a single payer Federally run system. That is Obama’s and other Democrats stated goal.

        “I imagine that would affect 50 million employees and their families.”

        Has affected millions and now that the election is over will affect many millions more.

      2. I imagine that would affect 50 million employees and their families.

        As a fact checker reported at the time, “The McCain-Palin campaign and the Republican National Committee are running a 60-second radio spot that says Obama’s plan would “rob 50 million employees of their health care.” That’s false. It’s a complete misrepresentation of a Lewin Group study of another health care plan entirely, one put forth by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, not by Obama.”

        1. What’s false about McCain’s accusation? I think the next ten years will be educational for you, should you deign to pay attention.

          1. It’s false because McCain didn’t analyze Obama’s proposal and conclude that it would cost 50 million people health coverage, he just borrowed the conclusions of a study of a completely different proposal.

            There isn’t any study of Obama’s campaign proposal or Obamacare as passed that concludes that it would rob 50 million people of health coverage. Studies of Obamacare conclude the opposite, that it will greatly reduce the number of people without coverage.

    4. Here is the difference between “Conservative” jurists and “Liberal” jurists. The Conservative jurists interpret the law based on what is written down in the context of what words meant when that writing took place. The Conservatives don’t always get what they want from their Conservative jurists — Roe v Wade, for example, never got reversed owing to strict application of Conservative principles of what it would take to overturn a prior decision. Liberals don’t have that difficulty with “their” jurists as they simply make stuff up.

      Here you have language in the PPACA regarding Exchanges and “the state” and “a state.” Don’t be coy with me, “a state” refers to one of the 57 States in the Union (some of them called Commonwealths) and not The Sun King’s pronouncement “The State is Me.” The language is as plain as the nose on my face that the Federal subsidies are limited to “an exchange established by a state”, where there is language “upstream” referring to “the state” in terms of the entity regulating insurance and so on.

      So the argument is “oh, noes, you cannot rule that way, that language is a ‘drafting error’ in how this legislation was cobbled together and then rushed through the House without corrections owing to the Scott Brown election.”

      OK, now we are arguing the “original intent” of the people who wrote that law? The intent was that individual state governments, even those with Republican governors and legislatures, especially those states with Republican governors, could not remain “pure” in their opposition, they would have to get their fingerprints all over this thing because the ACA would be immensely popular, and there would be dire political consequences to not setting up an exchange and freezing your citizens out of the Federal subsidies.

      How to we know this. There has been all kinds of Federal Constitutional overreaches ranging from the 55 MPH speed limit, the 21 drinking age where states were not compelled, but you could do without Federal matching dollars on your highway projects. And now you have Professor Jonathan Gruber caught bragging about it on video.

      So this plan didn’t survive contact with the Republican opposition at the state level that was backed up by Red State mistrust of Washington, and now they are begging for “air support” (favorable court rulings).

      The other thing about Professor Gruber, his style of speaking is not unusual for Faculty Senate here at the U, which is well-accepted within our halls but outright annoying to people outside them. I know a lot of folks consider a certain Midwestern Governor to be a Good Thing ™, but he wouldn’t be our governor if people in Faculty Senate weren’t going out of their way to “poke people in the eye” everytime they say anything, much as you are now observing the good MIT Professor in action.

    5. As an aside, the Washington Post states that Gruber met with President Obama, the present and past heads of the CBO, and another economist.

      And his advice was important at critical moments when the bill’s survival was in jeopardy.

      One of those times was July 20, 2009.

      Four days before, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf had declared that the bills that were going through the legislative process in the House and Senate would fail to bring the “fundamental change” necessary to bring down health costs over the long run. Elmendorf’s pronouncement struck at one of the basic rationales for the whole endeavor of overhauling the nation’s health-care system, even as opposition was building on the right.

      Gruber was among a small group of economists that the president summoned to the Oval Office to meet with him and Elmendorf. The other two were former CBO director Alice Rivlin and Harvard University health economist David Cutler. They pored over the bill to look for other, more credible ways to wring out savings.

      Not only does this show once again the influence of Gruber, it also demonstrates the less than independent nature of the CBO, the “gold standard for fiscal debates in Washington”.

      1. That vignette illustrates the CBO’s independence. A subservient CBO would have reported that the bills would reduce costs the way their framers hoped. Instead the CBO was skeptical, forcing the framers to modify the bills (and even then the CBO remained doubtful that health care costs would be controlled).

    1. What people died? More people have health insurance now than did a year or two ago, thanks to Obama, Sebelius, Gruber, Reid, Pelosi, et al.

        1. I love how rightists can go ballistic about Gruber’s “lies” and then talk about death panels and rationing with a straight face.

          Can you identify a single person who’s died as a result of Obamacare-mandated death panels/rationing? I didn’t think so.

  4. That’s right, there was no guarantee that the cost-control provisions would work. The CBO wasn’t convinced, and conservatively scored the bill as if they wouldn’t. Fortunately they, and/or something else, is working, and health care cost growth has dropped since 2010.

    I vote this as lie of the year. I could provide links to prove it, as I have done in the past, but Jim will ignore them.

  5. Obamacare has greatly increased the number of Americans with health coverage. If you think not having coverage causes deaths, Obamacare is saving lives, and repealing Obamacare would cost lives.

    Again, conjecture. Repealing it would return America to a place where freedom of choice is allowed, property rights are respected and the individual is allowed to be left alone by busybodies like you. Well, not completely, but it would be a good start.

    1. Repealing it would return America to a place where freedom of choice is allowed, property rights are respected and the individual is allowed to be left alone by busybodies like you.

      And fewer of those individuals would have health insurance coverage, so more of them would die. You can’t argue that Obamacare taking away people’s coverage costs lives, and then turn around and say that taking away people’s coverage by repealing Obamacare wouldn’t cost lives. If not having coverage => higher chance of death, then Obamacare => fewer deaths, and repealing Obamacare => more deaths.

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