Tag: Jonathan Gruber

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Vermont Attorney General’s Concludes Investigation Into Jonathan Gruber Invoices for Single-Payer Economic Model

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August 17, 2017
the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, It seems the Vermont Attorney General’s Office has concluded its investigation into the invoices and billing practices of Dr. Jonathan Gruber, an economic consultant, who contracted with the State of Vermont in July 2014 to provide policy expertise, research and economic modeling relating to the implementation of Vermont’s single-payer healthcare system, Green Mountain Care. The Office’s investigation was opened following a referral by State Auditor Doug Hoffer. The Attorney General’s Office and Dr. Gruber have reached an agreement to settle the State’s potential legal claim that Gruber submitted false claims to the State under Vermont’s Civil False Claims Act.

Gruber, who helped design the federal Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, came under fire in 2014 after he made disparaging comments about voters, calling Democratic voters stupid and saying these voters would believe anything they were told.

According to the Settlement Agreement, Dr. Gruber’s personal services contract with the State was a standard “time and materials” contract which specified that Gruber would be paid only for services actually performed and required Gruber to submit monthly invoices describing the work performed and the amounts billed for such work. The Office’s investigation revealed that Gruber submitted at least two invoices that were false with respect to the amount of work performed by Gruber’s research assistant. Further, the supporting documentation provided by Gruber did not reflect the actual hours worked by the research assistant, nor did the assistant keep records accurately reflecting the hours he devoted to the state project. The Attorney General’s Office concluded that Dr. Gruber’s conduct violated the Vermont Civil False Claims Act. While Dr. Gruber denied that there was a violation, in order to resolve the matter, he agreed to forgo any further payment that might be due from the State under the contract, including $90,000 outstanding for retainage amounts and unpaid research assistant tim

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ObamaCare continues to make life more difficult for New Jersey families

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“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever,” Jonathan Gruber, a professor at MIT and an architect of Obamacare

Rep.Scott Garrett :Time find solutions that will increase actually make health care more affordable and accessible for everyone.

“While we were promised affordable prices and increased competition with ObamaCare, we’ve only seen premium prices spike and insurance companies exit the unworkable exchanges. You’ve probably heard a number of news reports this week about the increased healthcare costs many people are facing as a result of this disastrous law. Unfortunately, New Jersey is no exception.

If you are one of the thousands of residents here in the Garden State expected to participate in ObamaCare open enrollment that starts this week, chances are you’ve been hit by massive sticker shock. You’ve probably also noticed that you’ve had less choice than you had in the past as only two insurance companies remain in New Jersey’s exchanges. It’s obvious that ObamaCare isn’t working for New Jersey’s families.

Supporters of ObamaCare told us that it would save the average family $2,500 a year on premiums.  Instead, we are finding out that premiums will increase by an average of 25 percent.  We were also told, “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”  Instead, at least 76,000 New Jerseyans are now forced to switch insurance providers.  And these families are quickly finding out that switching insurance providers is difficult. New plans may mean leaving the family doctor you’ve seen for years and interrupting ongoing medical treatment.

The Affordable Care Act is not affordable and it is forcing American families to make unwanted compromises about their healthcare.

New Jerseyans shouldn’t have to pay the price for ObamaCare’s broken promises.  That is why I will continue to fight to repeal ObamaCare and work in a bipartisan manner to find solutions that will increase actually make health care more affordable and accessible for everyone.”

Sincerely,

Scott Garrett

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Jonathan Gruber: Obamacare is ‘working as designed’

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He’s back ….Obama’s lying Obamacare “stupid Americans” creep/expert, Jonathan Gruber raises his ugly head once again so he can add insult to injury because he says that 2500 dollars a year mandate penalty is not enough for people who are struggling, that cannot afford Obamacare, do not have health coverage and literally have nothing left to pay the government for doing NOTHING!  Joe Killian

POSTED AT 5:31 PM ON OCTOBER 26, 2016 BY JOHN SEXTON

Jonathan Gruber is making the rounds on television again to tell us Obamacare is “working as designed.” Today he appeared on CNN to argue that, despite the 25% rate hikes for states using the national exchange, there wasn’t a problem with the law.

“Is Obamacare imploding?” CNN’s host asked Gruber. “No, Obamacare’s not imploding,” Gruber replied. Asked about the coming premium hikes for 2017 Gruber said, “First of all, the 22% increase, let’s remember who that applies to. That applies to a very small fraction of people who have to buy insurance without the subsidies that are available.” He continued, “Eight-five percent of people who are buying insurance on the exchanges get subsidies and for those people this premium increase doesn’t affect them.”

Here again is the Obamacare proponent’s favorite statistic. Normally, I would give someone the benefit of the doubt on something like this but not Gruber. He demonstrated a long time ago that he’s not an honest broker. “Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever but basically that was really critical to getting the thing to pass,” Gruber once said when defending the tortured way in which the law was written. Gruber applauds deception in the selling of Obamacare:

https://hotair.com/archives/2016/10/26/jonathan-gruber-obamacare-working-designed/

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Jonathan Gruber and the Truth About Obamacare

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Sen. Chuck Schumer’s admission that passing Obamacare was a mistake.

Jonathan Gruber and the Truth About Obamacare

In a 2009 interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, President Obama emphatically rejected the notion that the individual mandate is a tax. He was adamant that it was a penalty and not a tax, reasoning that because people without health insurance sometimes end up in the emergency room, causing costs to rise for the rest of us, the individual mandate penalty was not a tax.

Then in 2012, White House attorneys argued before the Supreme Court that it was indeed tax, and repeatedly called it that before the Court, which in its ruling found that the only way the mandate could pass constitutional muster was if it is construed as a tax, not a penalty. In what is by now Gruber’s most famous video, he explains that the bill was “written in a tortured way to ensure that CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes the bill dies.” Clearly, he considers the mandate a tax, albeit one cleverly written not to be scored as such by the Congressional Budget Office, but a tax nonetheless.

This is a pattern. In one of the Gruber videos, he admitted that the purpose of the “Cadillac tax” on certain employer-sponsored health plans is to discourage employers from providing health insurance. The ultimate goal, Gruber explained, is to get rid of the tax subsidy for employer health plans altogether, albeit indirectly, by “mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people when we all know it’s a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.” At a town hall meeting in 2009, the president specifically said this was not the purpose of the Cadillac tax and that it had been “taken off the table.”

In terms of understanding Gruber’s unexpected honesty about his deceit, it could be that four years is just the distance necessary for people in politics to admit their failings. That seems to be the rationale for Sen. Chuck Schumer’s admission that passing Obamacare was a mistake.

https://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2014/11/25/jonathan-gruber-and-truth-about-obamacare

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‘Stupidity’ consultant agrees to testify

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‘Stupidity’ consultant agrees to testify

By Sarah Ferris – 11/25/14 06:00 AM EST

Jonathan Gruber, the former ObamaCare adviser in hot water for his comments about the “stupidity of the American voter,” has agreed to testify at a House panel next month, setting up a healthcare showdown in what could be the final week of this Congress.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will also hear from Obama administration official Marilyn Tavenner, who is under fire this week for using inflated enrollment figures for the healthcare law.

“Both Mr. Gruber and Administrator Tavenner have agreed to testify,” committee spokeswoman Caitlin Carroll told The Hill.

Both figures have played a role in major political headaches for the Obama administration, which is facing new allegations of “repeated transparency failures and outright deceptions” from Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be grilled for a number of speeches he has given since 2010 that blame the Obama administration for intentionally obscuring details of the healthcare law in order to assure its passage.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/225236-stupidity-consultant-agrees-to-testify

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Obama praised ‘bright ideas’ of health-care architect who called voters stupid

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Obama praised ‘bright ideas’ of health-care architect who called voters stupid

By Marisa Schultz

November 18, 2014 | 2:26am

WASHINGTON — The videos Democrats never wanted to see keep coming.

A day after President Obama tried to distance himself from a top health-care architect who said voter “stupidity” led to ObamaCare’s passage, a video surfaced of Obama praising the offensive professor for his bright ideas.

The Washington Free Beacon uncovered a video from 2006 of Obama telling a Brookings Institution panel he had “stolen ideas liberally” from MIT professor Jonathan Gruber.

Then-Sen. Obama praised Gruber and other academic and policy experts as the “brightest minds.”

https://nypost.com/2014/11/18/more-stupidity-in-latest-obamacare-video/?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=NYPTwitter&utm_medium=SocialFl

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Yes, Jonathan Gruber Is An Obamacare “Architect”

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Yes, Jonathan Gruber Is An Obamacare “Architect”

The health law’s allies are trying to distance themselves from the economist’s remarks about the deception involved in passing the law. But they’re only proving him right.

Peter Suderman | November 18, 2014

In the space of a week, Jonathan Gruber has become a non-person in Washington. Until last Monday, the MIT health economist was widely and uncontroversially cited as an “architect” of the Affordable Care Act, a go-toexpert regarding the law’s politics and mechanics. But after multiple videos surfaced in which Gruber said or implied that the bill’s backers relied on deception and an assumption of voter stupidity in order to pass it, Obamacare’s backers moved swiftly to distance themselves from Gruber and downplay his role in the creation of the law.

Asked about Gruber’s videotaped declaration that “lack of transparency” provided “a huge political advantage,” Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi responded dismissively. “I don’t know who he is,” she said. “He didn’t help write our bill.” A Wall Street Journal item by Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress and a former administration staffer, opened by insisting that Gruber “did not make policy, nor did he work for the White House, HHS, or any congressional committee.” Jay Angoff, the former overseer of the health law’s implementation at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), told Politico that Gruber was neither a legislator nor a staffer. “He’s like 300 million other Americans who can have their opinion.”

Even the president himself weighed in. Responding over the weekend to questions about Gruber’s statements, President Obama pushed back on Gruber’s role, labeling him “some adviser who was never on our staff.” Gruber’s remarks, Obama said, were “not a reflection on the actual process that was run” when crafting and passing Obamacare.

https://reason.com/archives/2014/11/18/yes-jonathan-gruber-is-an-obamacare-arch

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THE OBAMACARE SHOW, STARRING JOHNNY GRUBER – H-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E’S JOHNNY!

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THE OBAMACARE SHOW, STARRING JOHNNY GRUBER – H-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E’S JOHNNY!

NOVEMBER 18, 2014  LEAVE A COMMENT

By Scott St. Clair | The Save Jersey Blog

For a guy as smart as Jonathan Gruber, he sure is dumb. In the Internet age, where everything you say or do is recorded for posterity and available in three seconds via Google, did he really think he could call us names and get away with it – over and over again?



Last week, several videos were released that document Gruber’s blasé contempt for the American voter. In the first one of several discovered by a Philadelphia-area investment consultant who lost his health insurance because it didn’t meet Obamacare standards, Gruber blithely confesses that the president’s healthcare plan was conceived in secret double-shuffle trickery and dedicated to the proposition that the American people are too stupid to understand when they are being conned (the juicy part starts at the 20:25 mark and runs for one minute):

To hear that the funding scheme was deliberately made confusing to hide the fact that it’s a tax – “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” – and that the geniuses who cooked it up figured it would be easy to put one over on those of us in the great unwashed – “stupidity of the American voter” – by itself should be sufficient to outrage the average voter.

But there’s more. Throughout the week on a daily basis, similar videos starring Gruber at a number of venues around the country spanning a couple of years surfaced. You can see them here (31:00 minute mark “too stupid to understand the Cadillac tax”), here (29:00 minute mark again on the Cadillac tax, former Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry called “a hero” and “lack of economic understanding on the part of the American people”), here (22:00 minute mark on the Obamacare taxation con game and phony “cost control” sales pitch) and here (1:26 clip where Gruber laughs at and mocks Obamacare concerns of a Vermonter as “adolescent”).

Lest you think he is a one-hit wonder, week two of Gruber releases started out with a slide presentation he prepared wherein he said America’s senior citizens “do a terrible job” selecting health care plans. What will tomorrow bring?

https://savejersey.com/2014/11/obamacare-gruber-video/

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Rick Jensen: Could Obamacare architect be prosecuted?

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Rick Jensen: Could Obamacare architect be prosecuted?
MTN3:39 p.m. CST November 14, 2014

Victims are millions of Americans who lost their major medical insurance due to Obamacare

Deceit. Fraud. Premeditated felonious theft from millions of Americans.

Now that Jonathan Gruber, known as “The Architect” of Obamacare, has been publicly revealed as a joyful con artist in a YouTube video, are his actions prosecutable?

The victims are the millions of Americans who lost their major medical insurance policies due to Obamacare, lost their doctors, their children’s doctors, their family’s cancer specialists and coverage at children’s hospitals and cancer clinics because of a law that was sold to Americans as being just the opposite.

The victims are the millions of Americans whose premiums increased so dramatically that they are forced to drop their coverage.

A video recently posted of the MIT professor speaking in 2013 as an academic panelist is a criminal confession in which he gleefully bragged that the ironically-named “Affordable Care Act” was written in such a way as to obfuscate the true nature of the bill’s effects and hide from the American public and the Congressional Budget Office the fact that if they told the truth the bill would not pass.

In Gruber’s own words: “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 … Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”

Liberal elites nod their heads at this, agreeing that the American people are too stupid to know what’s good for them. The elites feel compelled to tell you and me how we should live. After all, it “was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”

https://www.baxterbulletin.com/story/opinion/2014/11/14/obamacare-architect-prosecuted/19027767/

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Obamacare : State, federal insurance sites face first-day hiccups

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Obamacare : State, federal insurance sites face first-day hiccups

Jayne O’Donnell and Laura Ungar, USAToday10:51 p.m. EST November 15, 2014

Open enrollment on the federal HealthCare.gov site kicked off relatively smoothly in many parts of the nation Saturday, although there were reports in some areas that consumers and brokers had problems logging into accounts.

Healthcare.gov launched amid much anticipation after last year’s botched rollout.. Department of Health and Human Services reported more than 23,000 people had submitted applications in the first eight hours.

Just as the federal log in issues appeared resolved Saturday afternoon, issues on state-run sites cropped up.

Across the U.S. state-run exchanges were having mixed success enrolling people. Washington state had to take its exchange offline to resolve a problem in which 2015 tax credit amounts were being incorrectly calculated for customers. In Colorado, plans that include cost-sharing subsidies weren’t showing up for broker Louise Norris, who also got frequent error messages as she navigated the site.

At least she was able to enroll customers. Brokers at the Health Insurance Store of Louisiana in Baton Rouge weren’t able to do that until early afternoon. Owner Will Chapman says none of the 10 agents or their clients could log into accounts until about 1 p.m. CT Saturday.

“We’d go in with an e-mail account, set up an account, verify it and create a password, but when go back to actually log in with that information, it says your password is invalid,” says Chapman.

After a lengthy wait on hold for the call center around midday, Chapman says, they were told the problem was systemwide.

“The vast majority of users are having a smooth experience during the first day of Open Enrollment on HealthCare.gov as they fill out applications, browse and enroll in plans,” HHS spokesman Aaron Albright said in an e-mailed statement. “We expect to experience the normal issues that any other complicated technology project does upon launch and have seen a small number so far.”

Albright said the department “will continue to work every day to make the consumer experience simpler and easier.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/15/open-enrollment-healthcaregov-affordable-care-act-site-performance/19085637/

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Obamacare Architect Jonathan Gruber Admited in 2012 That Subsidies Were Limited to State-Run Exchanges

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Obamacare Architect Jonathan Gruber Admited in 2012 That Subsidies Were Limited to State-Run Exchanges

Earlier this week, a three-judge panel in the D.C. Circuit Court ruled that, contrary to the Obama administration’s implementation and an Internal Revenue Service rule, Obamacare’s subsidies for private health insurance were limited to state-run health exchanges.

The reasoning for this ruling was simple: That’s what the law says. The section dealing with the creation of state exchanges and the provision of subsidies states, quite clearly, that subsidies are only available in exchanges “established by a State,” which the law expressly defines as the 50 states plus the District of Columbia.

Obamacare’s defenders have responded by saying that this is obviously ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense in the larger context of the law, and what’s more, no one who supported the law or voted for it ever talked about this. It’s a theory concocted entirely by the law’s opponents, the health law’s backers argue, and never once mentioned by people who crafted or backed the law.

It’s not. One of the law’s architects—at the same time that he was a paid consultant to states deciding whether or not to build their own exchanges—was espousing exactly this interpretation as far back in early 2012, and long before the Halbig suit—the one that was decided this week against the administration—was filed. (A related suit, Pruitt v. Sebelius, had been filed earlier, but did not challenge tax credits within the federal exchanges until an amended version which was filed in late 2012.) It was also several months before the first publication of the paper by Case Western Law Professor Jonathan Adler and Cato Institute Health Policy Director Michael Cannon which detailed the case against the IRS rule.

Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist who helped design the Massachusetts health law that was the model for Obamacare, was a key influence on the creation of the federal health law. He was widely quoted in the media. During the crafting of the law, the Obama administration brought him on for consultation because of his expertise. He was paid almost $400,000 to consult with the administration on the law. And he has claimed to have written part of the legislation, the section dealing with small business tax credits.

https://reason.com/blog/2014/07/24/watch-obamacare-architect-jonathan-grube