“The Obama administration took another step to close what many see as a health-law loophole that allows large employers to offer medical plans without hospital coverage and bars their workers from subsidies to buy their own insurance.
“It has come to our attention that certain group health plan designs that provide no coverage of inpatient hospital services are being promoted,” the Department of Health and Human Services said in proposed rules issued late Friday.”
“In a somewhat ironic fashion, if Jonathan Gruber has taught us anything, it’s that telling the truth won’t get you far in the political world. After famously describing how the success of Obamacare relied heavily on the gullibility and short attention span of the voters, both former and prospective employers have been scurrying away from him like he was an Ebola dog. First he saw his old friends Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi stricken with shocking bouts of amnesia where they seemed unable to even recall his name. Then a plush job with the the state of Vermont – to the tune of $400K – had the plug pulled on it. And now, North Carolina has shown Mr. Gruber the door.”
“WASHINGTON – A new video has surfaced showing economist Jonathan Gruber, who made controversial comments about how the Affordable Care Act was written, talking about states’ opposition to the Medicaid expansion in the law, and the role poverty may play in its success or failure.
“There’s larger principles at stake here,” Gruber said in the video, which appeared on the website Healthinsurance.org in April. “When these states are not just turning down covering the poor people, but turning down the federal stimulus that would come with that.
“They’re not just not interested in covering poor people, they’re willing to sacrifice billions of dollars in injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. I mean, it really is just almost awesome in its evilness.””
“The man who changed the ObamaCare debate was at a gas station when I reached him, and he wasn’t dying to talk.
“I really want to stay out of the limelight,” said Rich Weinstein, a Philadelphia investment adviser. “This is not about me.”
But it is about him in the sense that if not for one slightly obsessed citizen, we wouldn’t have the videos of Jonathan Gruber saying the health care law was deceptively designed and its passage depended on the stupidity of the American public. And it is about his frustrating struggle to get that information out to the media.”
“I understand we’ve turned the page to the next controversy — Obama’s unconstitutional immigration pander — but I’d like to dwell a little longer on the previous travesty.
Obama administration health-care consultant Jonathan Gruber was discovered to have boasted that Obamacare was designed to exploit the “stupidity” of American voters and elude honest accounting by hiding both its cost and the taxes necessary to pay for it.”
“It should come as no surprise to Townhall readers that the new Republican congress has no plan to deal intelligently with Obamacare. That’s unfortunate. The worst thing that can happen over the next two years is for president Obama to appear to take the high road – insuring the uninsured and fighting the mean insurance companies – while Republicans rail about the small and trivial parts of health reform.
And the worst thing that can happen is the very thing that is about to happen. So here is some unsolicited advice.”
“Once upon a time, it was gauche to accuse one’s ideological opposition of exploiting the rules by which the Congressional Budget Office plays the scoring game. It’s worth revisiting this idea in the wake of MIT academic Jonathan Gruber’s admission of guilt to this charge.
Way back in 2011, there were conservatives writing about how the CBO’s score of the Affordable Care Act rested on “budget gimmicks,” “smoke and mirrors,” and “a dismal track record.””
““This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.”
– MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, captured on videotape
What did Gruber mean when he uttered this words in a now-infamous video that has inflamed hostility to the Affordable Care Act?
“Gruber, who was paid half a million dollars to design Obamacare, is on tape bragging about how the Democrats relied on “the stupidity of the American voter” to pass that law. Which, ironically, was sort of a stupid thing to say on camera.
By now there are so many tapes of Gruber explaining how Obamacare fooled stupid Americans that they’re being released as a boxed set in time for Christmas.”
“The mainstream press – a term which is rapidly losing all meaning as Fox News has begun to not only dominate cable news but the networks as well, but what was once understood to include big city newspapers and the three broadcast networks – has largely ignored the scandal surrounding Jonathan Gruber’s many impolitic comments.