The press corps is agonizing, or claims to be agonizing, over the news of Jonathan Gruber's conflict of interest: The MIT economist has been among the foremost promoters of ObamaCare—even as he had nearly $400,000 in consulting contracts with the Administration that weren't disclosed in the many stories in which he was cited as an independent authority. . .
White House budget director Peter Orszag has also relied on a letter from Mr. Gruber and other economists endorsing the Senate bill.

In a December conference call with reporters, Mr. Orszag said that "I agree with Jon Gruber that basically everything that has been put forward in health policy discussions for a decade is in this bill." He also praised "the folks who have actually done the reporting and read the bill and gone through and done the hard work to actually examine, rather than just going on buzz and sort of loose talk, but actually gone through and looked at the specific details in the bill," citing Mr. Brownstein in particular. Which is to say, the journalists who had "done the reporting" were those who agreed with the Gruber-White House spin.

Mr. Orszag never mentioned Mr. Gruber's contract. Nor did HHS disclose the contract when Mike Enzi, the ranking Republican on the Senate health committee, asked specifically for a list of all consultants as part of routine oversight in July. His request noted that "Transparency regarding these positions will help ensure that the public has confidence in the qualifications, character and abilities of individuals serving in these positions."

For those skeptical about the ability to restrain health care cost growth in heath reform, read Ron Brownstein’s latest article on how the bills now being considered in Congress would transform the health care system so that it delivers better care to more Americans at far less cost.

As readers of this blog know, I just wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post laying out the four pillars that I (and 23 leading economists from across the political spectrum) believe must be part of fiscally responsible health reform: deficit neutrality, an excise tax on high-premium health plans, an independent Medicare commission, and game-changing delivery system reforms.

Brownstein reads the bill, examines these pillars, and then calls up many of these economists to get their take on the Senate bill. MIT economist Jonathan Gruber — who calls himself "sort of a known skeptic on this stuff" — says, "Everything is in here....I can't think of anything I'd do that they are not doing in the bill." And Len Nichols of the New American Foundation told Brownstein: "The bottom line is the legislation is sending a signal that business as usual [in the medical system] is going to end."

All the elements are there for fiscally responsible health reform. For more, read the entire piece.

So, your background, please.
I'm a professor of economics at MIT. I helped Gov. Romney develop the Massachusetts health care reform, or Romneycare. I then worked with the Obama administration and Congress to help develop the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

And then Obama gets elected, and on his health advising team is a number of my friends from the Clinton administration who worked on health care reform round one. I like to think of it as sort of the preseason of what became the ultimate -- I don't want to demean the amazing amount of work that went into that, but these are veterans of those wars who were now on the Obama team saying: "Look, we have the opportunity to do what we were unable to do under Clinton and get this done. We think the Massachusetts model is the way to go. We would like you to come help the administration put the numbers together just like you did for Massachusetts."

So I went down shortly after the election. I worked with the transition team to help put the numbers together for the administration. And then, essentially, most of 2009 I was really on loan from the administration to Congress, particularly the Senate Finance Committee, to help them put the numbers together on what became the finance committee bill, which really became Obamacare. Yeah, that's what I did.

So were you ever in a room with Obama?
Yes, twice.

Tell me. Take me there.
So the first time was in, I don't know exactly. You know, if I knew at the time how important it would be, I would have written down the date. It is like late 2006 maybe. It was right before he announced he was running. So maybe it was earlier than that, maybe spring 2006, right before he -- when people sort of knew he was thinking about it but he hadn't announced yet. I went down, basically did a tutorial for him on what we had done in Massachusetts and how it would work and basically thinking about expanding it to the national stage.

Where were you? Where was it?
This was in his Senate offices.

And what was he like then?
He was very interested. It was really just an information session. He was really interested in learning. He clearly was not interested in little incremental things. He wanted to be bold. That was clear. He said, "Look, I want to do big changes." He was really interested in what we had done in Massachusetts. The evidence wasn't in yet by the time I was meeting with him, but he was interested in what we had done. ...

The next time you see him?
The next time I see him is summer 2009. The big issue there is that he really wants to make sure I'm moving forward on cost control. I think that at this point he sort of knew we had a good plan on coverage, but he was worried on cost control. So we had a meeting in the Oval Office with several experts, including myself, on what can we do to get credible savings on cost control that the Congressional Budget Office would recognize and score as savings in this law.

 streamdragon wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Even if none of the things the Right said about it came true, the bad things that have happened(or will happen) with the ACA are more than enough to warrant its abolition. The whole thing is a piece of garbage, maybe not in the same ways people claimed, but that doesn't make it any more acceptable.

I am going to take issue with the bolded/underlined. There are several wonderful facets of ACA that everyone seems to want to ignore.

Before I detail that, let me be clear: I am one of the people who thought ACA didn't go far enough; that we should be moving to national healthcare, or at the very least single payer. I think the current insurance system is disgusting.

That said, an example: ACA removed the "pre-existing condition" excuse for denying coverage. It was, frankly, bs. It forced people to stay in garbage situations because switching insurance and sometimes JOBS meant losing coverage of a medical condition. Have cancer and lose your job? Your chances of getting coverage for your treatment were next to none. Now? Companies can't deny payment.

As a personal anecdote, which I believe I've shared with dakka before; I started having trouble with a salivary gland. At the time I first went to the doctor, my company offered garbage insurance, but garbage was better than no insurance. In the end, I had to have surgery to get the gland removed. It was so full of stones that instead of the normal pea sized gland in your neck, mine was roughly the size of a golfball. If ACA hadn't changed the "pre-existing condition" clause, I would have had to decide between changing jobs (and thus insurance) or staying with crappy job and insurance JUST so the medical bills didn't destroy me. Let's be clear here: Even with insurance I would have had to take out a loan to pay the tens of thousands of dollars my portion would have been. (My old insurance only payed 80% of hospital costs.) Instead, I waited, got a better job and was able to get better insurance. I payed my $200 deduction for surgery costs. That was it.

“You have already drawn some of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles, many of them I have stolen ideas from liberally,” Obama said. “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.”

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
Meh, I don't remember everyone I met back in 2006, and I'm sure I meet far fewer people than the people in D.C. do.

Again, politicians lie. This is nothing new. They do it all the time to get what they want. And what they want is to continue to ride the political gravy train at our expense. Republican, Democrat, it makes no difference.

It just isn't some great revelation that the politicians lied/distorted/twisted/spun the facts to get what they wanted. It's what they do. Don't like the ACA? That's fine. Don't like that the politicians lied about it? That's fine, too. Just don't act surprised that they lied about ACA when politicians have already been lying about everything since before you and I were born..

I think the difference between us is that you appear to still have some faith in your chosen politicians, where I have no faith at all in any of them. If they actually manage to accomplish something that is actually good for the nation, it would be in spite of themselves.

 streamdragon wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Even if none of the things the Right said about it came true, the bad things that have happened(or will happen) with the ACA are more than enough to warrant its abolition. The whole thing is a piece of garbage, maybe not in the same ways people claimed, but that doesn't make it any more acceptable.

I am going to take issue with the bolded/underlined. There are several wonderful facets of ACA that everyone seems to want to ignore.

Before I detail that, let me be clear: I am one of the people who thought ACA didn't go far enough; that we should be moving to national healthcare, or at the very least single payer. I think the current insurance system is disgusting.

That said, an example: ACA removed the "pre-existing condition" excuse for denying coverage. It was, frankly, bs. It forced people to stay in garbage situations because switching insurance and sometimes JOBS meant losing coverage of a medical condition. Have cancer and lose your job? Your chances of getting coverage for your treatment were next to none. Now? Companies can't deny payment.

As a personal anecdote, which I believe I've shared with dakka before; I started having trouble with a salivary gland. At the time I first went to the doctor, my company offered garbage insurance, but garbage was better than no insurance. In the end, I had to have surgery to get the gland removed. It was so full of stones that instead of the normal pea sized gland in your neck, mine was roughly the size of a golfball. If ACA hadn't changed the "pre-existing condition" clause, I would have had to decide between changing jobs (and thus insurance) or staying with crappy job and insurance JUST so the medical bills didn't destroy me. Let's be clear here: Even with insurance I would have had to take out a loan to pay the tens of thousands of dollars my portion would have been. (My old insurance only payed 80% of hospital costs.) Instead, I waited, got a better job and was able to get better insurance. I payed my $200 deduction for surgery costs. That was it.

 d-usa wrote:
That may be the biggest load of bs you have ever posted on Dakka, and you post a lot of partisan bs.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
Meh, I don't remember everyone I met back in 2006, and I'm sure I meet far fewer people than the people in D.C. do.

 whembly wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
That may be the biggest load of bs you have ever posted on Dakka, and you post a lot of partisan bs.

Which part?

It's on record that Obamacare was crafted on distortions and promised based on lies.

On.

Record.

 d-usa wrote:
I could just link to all the other threads where we already covered this multiple times.

But why waste the fething bandwith.

 whembly wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
That may be the biggest load of bs you have ever posted on Dakka, and you post a lot of partisan bs.

Which part?

It's on record that Obamacare was crafted on distortions and promised based on lies.

On.

Record.

Grey Templar wrote:Excrement covered in chocolate is still excrement. Doesn't matter if part of it would nice by itself, the bad parts make the good parts not good by virtue of being joined at the hip.

Relapse wrote:Since we are using anectdotes, I could tell you about an elderly couple that lost an insurance plan they loved due to Obamacare and had to replace it with a crappy plan because it was the only thing they can now afford.

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg went on a tear on Monday’s Special Report with Bret Baier, connecting the circles of lies by the White House and Jonathan Gruber that had impact thanks to liberal journalists. Goldberg charged that, in the lead up to the ObamaCare vote, Gruber was “being touted around through a transmission belt of liberal journalists, who all are all pretending to be objective analysts too, quoting each other, reaffirming each other, all with the help of the White House which went along with this soup to nuts – a process which this guy says was all about lies and misleading the American people.”

Goldberg on the November 17 Special Report with Bret Baier:

In a lot of ways, this spectacle represents not just everything’s that’s wrong with the Obama administration, it’s everything wrong with liberalism and a lot that’s wrong with America itself.

You’ve got this guy who is pretending to be an objective independent analyst, who’s got huge amounts of skin in the game in terms of money he can make off of consulting fees, but also of the prestige being involved and the speeches he could do which haven’t been tallied into these numbers -- anyway, it’s millions of dollars – being touted around through a transmission belt of liberal journalists, who all are all pretending to be objective analysts too, quoting each other, reaffirming each other, all with the help of the White House which went along with this soup to nuts – a process which this guy says was all about lies and misleading the American people. And then when caught about it, the same administration tries to dismiss him as if he was just some sort of random White House intruder. The whole thing stinks.

It’s not just that’s he’s getting rich, it’s the hypocrisy that every time Republicans complain about ObamaCare, they say “Oh, it’s just because those evil, profit-hungry Koch brothers are trying to get rich,” which was always a lie. It’s also that this law itself makes American life more complex and then there’s this leaching new class of people who profit from the complexity that they are imposing upon the society.

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:

 streamdragon wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:Excrement covered in chocolate is still excrement. Doesn't matter if part of it would nice by itself, the bad parts make the good parts not good by virtue of being joined at the hip.

Absolute nonsense. Banning bullcrap practices by insurance companies is a good thing no matter what else it was attached to. There are people alive today who would not be, had they not been able to get coverage for their conditions.

Relapse wrote:Since we are using anectdotes, I could tell you about an elderly couple that lost an insurance plan they loved due to Obamacare and had to replace it with a crappy plan because it was the only thing they can now afford.

And yet I never said ACA was 100% awesome. In fact, I specifically called it out as not going far enough. It sucks that couple (and many like them) lost the coverage they had. It does. Does that make far more people with serious medical conditions being able to now get coverage they were previously denied because of existing conditions, somehow bad? My point was that ACA was not, as Grey Templar said, 100% bad. I pointed out that there were positive aspects of it. I never once said, stated or implied that there were 0 negative aspects to it; I did just the
opposite.

Relapse wrote:

 streamdragon wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:Excrement covered in chocolate is still excrement. Doesn't matter if part of it would nice by itself, the bad parts make the good parts not good by virtue of being joined at the hip.

Absolute nonsense. Banning bullcrap practices by insurance companies is a good thing no matter what else it was attached to. There are people alive today who would not be, had they not been able to get coverage for their conditions.

Relapse wrote:Since we are using anectdotes, I could tell you about an elderly couple that lost an insurance plan they loved due to Obamacare and had to replace it with a crappy plan because it was the only thing they can now afford.

And yet I never said ACA was 100% awesome. In fact, I specifically called it out as not going far enough. It sucks that couple (and many like them) lost the coverage they had. It does. Does that make far more people with serious medical conditions being able to now get coverage they were previously denied because of existing conditions, somehow bad? My point was that ACA was not, as Grey Templar said, 100% bad. I pointed out that there were positive aspects of it. I never once said, stated or implied that there were 0 negative aspects to it; I did just the
opposite.

According to this poll, Obamacare has hurt far more people than it helped:


http://www.gallup.com/poll/178094/say-health-law-hurt-instead-helped.aspx

Washington (CNN) -- At a town hall meeting where he campaigned for health care legislation in 2009, President Barack Obama pledged to voters that he did not want any tax on health insurance plans he perceived as wastefully generous to ever impact average Americans. But in recent comments by one of the men who helped draft the legislation, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, that is not only precisely what will happen -- but that was the intention of the tax.

White House officials had no comment, despite repeated requests by CNN.

At issue is the tax on so-called "Cadillac plans," more expensive employer-provided health insurance plans. While employers do not currently have to pay taxes on health insurance plans they provide employees, starting in 2018, companies that provide health insurance that costs more than $10,200 for an individual or $27,500 for a family will have to pay a 40 percent tax.

At a town hall meeting on health care on July 23, 2009 in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Obama explained that the thinking of the Cadillac tax was to target plans that spend unnecessarily and excessively, thus driving up health care costs, such as a $25,000 plan, "so one that's a lot more expensive and a lot fancier than the one that even members of Congress get."

The thinking, Obama explained, was that "maybe at that point what you should do is you should sort of cap the exclusion, the tax deduction that is available, so that we're discouraging these really fancy plans that end up driving up costs."

The President at that point hadn't yet signed off on a Cadillac tax (he would eventually) but he did make the pledge: "what I said and I've taken off the table would be the idea that you just described, which would be that you would actually provide -- you would eliminate the tax deduction that employers get for providing you with health insurance, because, frankly, a lot of employers then would stop providing health care, and we'd probably see more people lose their health insurance than currently have it. And that's not obviously our objective in reform."

That promise is completely at odds with how Gruber describes not only that provision of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, but the intention of that provision.

In one of the videos that surfaced in recent days in which the man described by the Obama campaign as having helped to write Obamacare describes the many ways voters he calls stupid were easily misled about the bill by those pushing it, Gruber says the Cadillac tax will do exactly what the president pledged it would not -- dissuade employers in general from providing insurance for its employees.

"Economists have called for 40 years to get rid of the regressive, inefficient and expensive tax subsidy provided for employer provider health insurance," Gruber said at the Pioneer Institute for public policy research in Boston in 2011. The subsidy is "terrible policy," Gruber said.
"It turns out politically it's really hard to get rid of," Gruber said.

Gruber said the only way those pushing for Obamacare could get rid of the tax subsidy for employer provider health insurance was to tax the more generous, or Cadillac, plans -- "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."

The second way was have the tax kick in "late, starting in 2018" and have its rate of growth tied to the consumer price index instead of to the much higher rate of medical inflation. Eventually, the 40% tax on the more expensive plans would impact every employer-provided insurance plan.

"What that means is the tax that starts out hitting only 8% of the insurance plans essentially amounts over the next 20 years essentially getting rid of the exclusion for employer sponsored plans," Gruber said. "This was the only political way we were ever going to take on one of the worst public policies in America."

By 2018, Gruber said, those who object to the tax will be obligated to figure out how to come up with the trillion dollars that repealing the tax will take from the U.S. Treasury, or risk significantly adding to the national debt.

This is obviously exactly what Obama told voters in 2009 he had "taken off the table." It is exactly a process to "eliminate the tax deduction that employers get for providing you with health insurance" that five years ago Obama noted would result in "a lot of employers then would stop providing health care, and we'd probably see more people lose their health insurance than currently have it."

Relapse wrote:

According to this poll, Obamacare has hurt far more people than it helped:


http://www.gallup.com/poll/178094/say-health-law-hurt-instead-helped.aspx

Attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act remain sharply divided along party lines.

 streamdragon wrote:

Relapse wrote:

According to this poll, Obamacare has hurt far more people than it helped:


http://www.gallup.com/poll/178094/say-health-law-hurt-instead-helped.aspx

Attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act remain sharply divided along party lines.

shocking

Given many red states basically frelled their constituents over by refusing to expand medicaid/medicare, you'll forgive me if the 80% of republicans saying it made things work makes me doubt the poll actually says anything useful. It also asks a question, rather than looking at facts. So it's doubly useless.