The New York Times wants America to ignore Jonathan Gruber. Pay no attention to that architect behind the curtain!
Scott Whitlock at NewsBusters noted earlier today that a Times editorial on Jonathan "stupid voters" Gruber claims that the MIT economist was not an important player in the law's creation. The Times now insists that "In truth, his role was limited." The trouble is, Times reporters and columnists have paid quite a bit of attention to Gruber and the importance of his role in the creation, passage and defense of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, during the past five years.
Gruber is universally acknowledged as the architect of Romneycare. He was brought on in 2009 as a very well-paid adviser to the Obama administration as it stealthily put together the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
Here are just seven of the many references to Gruber during the past five years in the Times — limited because the Old Gray Lady insists that anyone wishing to see more than ten articles in any given month become a paid subscriber.
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1. March 28, 2012; "Academic Built Case for Mandate in Health Care Law"; Catherine Rampell
Reporter Rampell called Gruber "a numbers wizard at M.I.T.," and reported that "his research convinced the Obama administration that health care reform could not work without requiring everyone to buy insurance." She also wrote that "he has nearly cornered the market on the technical science behind these sorts of predictions," and that others "use Mr. Gruber’s work as a benchmark."
And there's this damning nugget for the paper's editorialists to digest:
... Mr. Gruber’s position as an adviser to the influential Congressional Budget Office also left him perfectly positioned to advise the White House on health reform.
... After Mr. Gruber helped the administration put together the basic principles of the proposal, the White House lent him to Capitol Hill to help Congressional staff members draft the specifics of the legislation.
Finally, Gruber is quoted as saying, "I know more about this law than any other economist."
2. February 14, 2014; "Stupidity in Economic Discourse"; Paul Krugman
The Times columnist, in attacking a dissenting op-ed by Casey Mulligan, called Gruber "The eminent health care economist and health reform architect" in his second sentence.
3. October 13, 2009; "M.I.T. Economist Rebuts Insurance Industry Report"; David M. Herszenhorn and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
In this early item, the two Times reporters, who appear to have been unaware of Gruber's already prominent role in drafting the law, characterized Gruber as the person "who helped Massachusetts with its effort to provide universal health insurance coverage," and published his full rebuttal to a Price Waterhouse Coopers report sanctioned by the insurance industry. The PWC report predicted that "premiums would rise sharply with the passage of comprehensive health care legislation."
One interesting point: The PWC report projected that, in the reporters' words, "so-called 'bronze plans' would be so costly that they would be hit by a proposed excise tax on high-priced or “Cadillac” insurance policies." Gruber ridiculed that claim. Since then, one Gruber video, as reported at Breitbart, has revealed the following:
... the next sneaky part of the Obamacare plan is that the "Cadillac tax" is tied to the slow-growing Consumer Price Index -- not the rate of the more quickly growing medical inflation rate.
This means that as time goes on, more employer insurance plans would suddenly be considered a "Cadillac" plan and more and more people would find themselves whacked with the 40 percent tax.
Given enough time and healthcare costs continuing to rise by at least twice the rate of inflation, it's not at all unreasonable to believe that "bronze plans," especially those with high numbers of people in their 50s and early 60s, might get socked with the Cadillac tax.
That, interestingly enough, leads to the next Times item — one which, in my view, reveals the fundamental naivete behind Gruber's supposedly amazing models and simulations.
4. May 27, 2013; "High-End Health Plans Scale Back to Avoid 'Cadillac Tax'"; Reed Abelson
Abelson reported that employers, contrary to Gruber's apparent static-analysis assumption that they would just sit there and either eat the Cadillac tax or pass it on to their pliant employees, were already scaling back their insurance plans to avoid the tax:
... workers with employer-paid health insurance are also beginning to feel the effects. Companies hoping to avoid the tax are beginning to scale back the more generous health benefits they have traditionally offered and to look harder for ways to bring down the overall cost of care.
In a way, the changes are right in line with the administration’s plan: To encourage employers to move away from plans that insulate workers from the cost of care and often lead to excessive procedures and tests, and galvanize employers to try to control ever-increasing medical costs.
Abelson, calling Gruber "the M.I.T. economist who played an influential role in shaping the law," quotes him as saying that the Cadillac tax is "focusing employers on cost control, not slashing." Many affected employees would, I suspect, beg to differ.
The Cadillac tax effect is arguably a form of rationing. But it's also a form of another "R-word," which no one is supposed to mention, but, as seen in the next Times item, represents the reality of how the ACA works.
5. November 23, 2013; "Don’t Dare Call the Health Law ‘Redistribution’"; John Harwood
Apparently confident that the law will never go away, Harwood acknowledged the irrefutable fact that redistribution is a fundamental "feature" of Obamacare, and in the process quoted Gruber:
These days the word is particularly toxic at the White House, where it has been hidden away to make the Affordable Care Act more palatable to the public and less a target for Republicans, who have long accused Democrats of seeking “socialized medicine.” But the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall.“Americans want a fair and fixed insurance market,” said Jonathan Gruber, a health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who advised Mr. Obama’s team as it designed the law. “You cannot have that without some redistribution away from a small number of people.”
6. April 10, 2014; "Health Care Nightmares"; Paul Krugman
Krugman quoted Gruber concerning many states' refusal to expand Medicaid as Obamacare envisioned:
The health economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the principal architects of health reform — and normally a very mild-mannered guy — recently summed it up: The Medicaid-rejection states “are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.”
We now know that Gruber, seen on tape even before the "stupid voters" videos surfaced, told audiences that Obamacare intended to punish residents of states which refused to set up their own Obamacare exchanges by refusing to subsidize their premiums. When the majority of states balked, the Department of Health and Human Services said, "never mind." Unfortunately for Obamacare advocates, the King v. Burwell case which is heading to the Supreme Court has credibly asserted that HHS's "never mind" was contrary to the the law's language.
All of this is especially ironic, given that some states tried and utterly failed to set up working exchanges. But the central point is that Obamacare intended to deliberately hold poor people hostage to states' willingness and, as we have learned, dubious ability to set up exchanges.
7. October 27, 2013; "Health Site’s Woes Could Dissuade Vital Enrollee: the Young and Healthy"; Annie Lowrey
Lowrey describes Gruber as "an economist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who helped create the Affordable Care Act."
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Too bad for the Times editorial writers that there are no digital Winston Smiths out there to flush these and so many other past reports down the memory hole — yet.
After five years of reports in their own paper saying the opposite, they have no credibility in now claiming that Jonathan Gruber's "role was limited."
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
