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Pelosi on Jonathan Gruber: ‘I don’t know who he is. He didn’t help write our bill.’

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Pelosi on Jonathan Gruber: ‘I don’t know who he is. He didn’t help write our bill.’

By Sean Sullivan November 13 at 12:04 PM

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sought Thursday to distance herself and her caucus from Jonathan Gruber, the economist who has caused a stir with comments that seemed to suggest the federal health-care law was created in a deceptive way.

"I don't know who he is. He didn't help write our bill," she told reporters at her weekly briefing.

Congressional Republicans have raised the possibility they could call Gruber to testify about his remarks. Gruber, who helped the Obama administration craft the Affordable Care Act, said last year the “stupidity of the American voter” and a “lack of transparency” over the way it is funded were advantages in the passage of the law. The comments only recently received widespread public attention.

Pelosi argued that Republicans are determined to attack the law regardless of what Gruber said and are simply using him to fuel their existing opposition to it.

"Mr. Gruber's comments were a year old and he has backtracked from most of them," she said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/11/13/pelosi-on-jonathan-gruber-i-dont-know-who-he-is-he-didnt-help-write-our-bill/

From pelosi's website

Health Insurance Reform Mythbuster: Health Insurance Reform Bill Will Result In Higher Premiums

Opponents of health insurance reform continue to spread myths about the recently-passed Affordable Health Care for America Act. For example, they are claiming that health reform would increase premiums for most of America's families. But the facts continue to knock these myths down–including a new report from the independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

MYTH: The House health insurance reform bill would result in higher premiums.

FACT: An analysis of the House bill by noted MIT health care economist Jonathan Gruber concludes that the bill would result in lower premiums than under current law for the millions of Americans using the newly-established Health Insurance Exchange — including those who are not receiving affordability credits to help them purchase coverage (the Health Insurance Exchange is for those without access to affordable employer-sponsored coverage). As Gruber states:

the premiums that individuals will face in the new exchanges established by this legislation are … considerably lower than what they would face in the non-group insurance market [under current law], due to the market reforms put in place by the House plan, the mandate on individuals to participate regardless of health, and the market economies of new exchanges.

The Gruber analysis finds that a family at 425% of poverty (whose income of $93,710 means that they would receive no affordability credits) would see their premiums reduced by $1,260, or 12% compared to current law:

4151082699_38e0a62ea3.jpg

Similarly, the Gruber analysis shows that an individual at 425% of poverty (whose income of $46,030 means that they would receive no affordability credits) would see their premiums reduced by $470 or 12%:

4151840970_a96b757085.jpg

The annual savings are much larger for lower income populations that receive affordability credits. Under the House bill, when the bill's affordability credits are taken into account, a family at 275% of poverty (income of $60,640) would save $5,030, or 47% in premiums compared to current law and a family at 175% of poverty (income of $38,590) would save $9,050 or 84% in premiums compared to current law.

Gruber also points out that even as individuals and families on the Exchange are paying less, they will be getting more. The coverage those on the Exchange get under the House plan would be better than today's typical coverage in the non-group market. For example, it would protect individuals and families from high out-of-pocket costs. That's in addition to other consumer protections in the bill — like ending discrimination based on pre-existing conditions and guaranteeing that your coverage won't be dropped or watered down when you get sick or need it most.

In addition to the Gruber analysis of premiums under the Exchange, CBO has just released an estimate for the vast majority of Americans who will continue to get their health insurance in the employer-sponsored group market finding under the similar Senate bill, premiums would either be reduced or stay the same. For the millions in the employer-sponsored market, premiums would be reduced by up to 3% or stay the same. And for all Americans, co-pays would be eliminated for preventive care and out-of-pocket expenses would be capped. Like Gruber, CBO found that for Americans using the non-group market, their coverage would significantly improve under health reform. The CBO data indicates that the Senate bill would reduce premiums by 14 to 20% for people in the non-group market when comparing plans that provide equivalent coverage.

Read the Gruber analysis»

http://www.democraticleader.gov/newsroom/health-insurance-reform-mythbuster-health-insurance-reform-bill-will-result-in-higher-premiums/?utm_content=buffer89738&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Edited by lostinblue

If more citizens were armed, criminals would think twice about attacking them, Detroit Police Chief James Craig

Florida currently has more concealed-carry permit holders than any other state, with 1,269,021 issued as of May 14, 2014

The liberal elite ... know that the people simply cannot be trusted; that they are incapable of just and fair self-government; that left to their own devices, their society will be racist, sexist, homophobic, and inequitable -- and the liberal elite know how to fix things. They are going to help us live the good and just life, even if they have to lie to us and force us to do it. And they detest those who stand in their way."
- A Nation Of Cowards, by Jeffrey R. Snyder

Tavis Smiley: 'Black People Will Have Lost Ground in Every Single Economic Indicator' Under Obama

white-privilege.jpg?resize=318%2C318

Democrats>Socialists>Communists - Same goals, different speeds.

#DeplorableLivesMatter

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Academic Built Case for Mandate in Health Care Law By CATHERINE RAMPELL Published: March 28, 2012 243 Comments

After Massachusetts, California came calling. So did Connecticut, Delaware, Kansas, Minnesota, Oregon, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Mr. Gruber advised Mitt Romney on health care when Mr. Romney was governor of Massachusetts.

They all wanted Jonathan Gruber, a numbers wizard at M.I.T., to help them figure out how to fix their health care systems, just as he had helped Mitt Romney overhaul health insurance when he was the Massachusetts governor.

Then came the call in 2008 from President-elect Obama’s transition team, the one that officially turned this stay-at-home economics professor into Mr. Mandate.

Mr. Gruber has spent decades modeling the intricacies of the health care ecosystem, which involves making predictions about how new laws will play out based on past experience and economic theory. It is his research that convinced the Obama administration that health care reform could not work without requiring everyone to buy insurance.

And it is his work that explains why President Obama has so much riding on the three days of United States Supreme Court hearings, which ended Wednesday, about the constitutionality of the mandate. Questioning by the court’s conservative justices has suggested deep skepticism about the mandate, setting off waves of worry among its backers — Mr. Gruber included.

“As soon as I started reading the dispatches my stomach started churning,” Mr. Gruber said of the arguments on Tuesday, while taking a break from quizzing his son for a biology test. “Losing the mandate means continuing with our unfair individual insurance markets in a world where employer-based insurance is rapidly disappearing.”

Mr. Gruber, 46, hates traveling without his wife and three children, so he is tracking the case from his home in Lexington, Mass. There he crunches numbers and advises other states on health care, in between headbanging at Van Halen concerts with his 15-year-old son and cuddling with the family’s eight parrots. (His wife, Andrea, volunteers at a bird rescue center.)

If the court rules against the mandate, Mr. Gruber says he believes the number of newly insured Americans could fall to eight million from the projected 32 million. He insists that without a mandate, the law will result in a terrible spiral: only relatively sick Americans will choose to get insurance, leading premium prices to rise and causing the healthier of even those sick people to drop their insurance, sending prices higher and higher.

Some other economists quibble, though, with Mr. Gruber’s pessimistic assessment.

“My general thought about the mandate is if insurance is affordable and accessible, most people will buy it anyway,” said David Cutler, an economist at Harvard and longtime collaborator of Mr. Gruber’s.

Others, like Paul Starr, a Princeton sociologist, say they believe Mr. Gruber’s work does not account for how hard it will be to enforce the mandate.

“There is this groupthink about how important the mandate is,” Mr. Starr says. “Most people don’t understand or won’t acknowledge how weak the enforcement mechanism is.”

Mr. Starr said he thought Mr. Gruber in particular was overstating the effectiveness of the mandate because “it’s his baby.”

That said, it is difficult for too many other experts to categorically refute Mr. Gruber’s work, since he has nearly cornered the market on the technical science behind these sorts of predictions. Other models exist — built by nonprofits like the RAND Corporation or private consultancies like the Lewin Group — but they all use Mr. Gruber’s work as a benchmark, according to Jean Abraham, a health economist at the University of Minnesota and former senior economist in both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations.

“He’s brought a level of science to an issue that would otherwise be just opinion,” Mr. Cutler says. “He’s really the only person who has been doing all this careful modeling for so long. He’s the only person you can go to for that kind of thing, which is why the White House reached out to him in the first place.”

Mr. Obama had made health care reform a cornerstone of his campaign, and wanted to announce a credible proposal quickly after taking office. But members of the Obama administration’s transition team said they had inherited an executive branch that had vastly underinvested in modeling research on health care, especially compared to the technical modeling that had been done in areas like tax policy.

“Creating a good model from scratch would have taken months, maybe years,” said Lawrence H. Summers, who was the director of President Obama’s National Economic Council and had advised Mr. Gruber on his dissertation when they were at Harvard.

Mr. Gruber had already spent years researching government mandates, starting with his 1991 dissertation about how mandated employer benefits cut into workers’ wages.

He also did similar analyses, on a broader range of public policies for the Treasury Department in the Clinton administration from 1997-98. He was recruited by Mr. Summers, who was then deputy secretary of Treasury.

Then in 2001, after returning to M.I.T., Mr. Gruber received an e-mail from Amy Lischko, who was then an assistant commissioner in the Massachusetts healthy policy department under then-Gov. Jane M. Swift, a Republican.

She was familiar with his work, and contracted him to model some potential ways that Massachusetts could expand health insurance coverage.

“He certainly wasn’t as well known then as he is now in the health care arena,” said Ms. Lischko, now a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. “We couldn’t exactly kick the tires on these kinds of models back then, but we knew he had done work on simulations before.”

Mr. Gruber calls himself a “card-carrying Democrat.” He and his wife host a “great quadrennial Democratic victory party” whether or not the Democratic candidate wins, he said. But given his reputation and relatively rare expertise, he still ended up working for two Republican governors in Massachusetts.

When Mr. Romney succeeded Ms. Swift in 2003, he proposed using an individual mandate to help the state achieve universal health care coverage. Mr. Gruber was again brought in to analyze the idea, which he had not formally modeled before.

“Romney saw it as a traditional Republican moral issue of personal responsibility, getting rid of the free riders in the system, not as much of an economic issue,” Mr. Gruber said. “Not only were the Republicans for it, the liberals hated it. People forget that.”

Mr. Obama had vehemently opposed an individual mandate before his election in 2008.

After the Massachusetts plan passed in 2006, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the Republican governor of California, invited Mr. Gruber to Sacramento to help model a similar proposal.

“That was awesome,” Mr. Gruber says, his eyes widening at the memory. “I got to see the sword from Conan the Barbarian.”

The California proposal fell apart, but soon Mr. Gruber had a little cottage industry helping states model potential health system changes. He also serves on the Massachusetts board that oversees the state’s new health care exchanges.

Along with these credentials, 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.

“The most important arbiter of everything was the C.B.O.,” said Neera Tanden, who was a senior adviser for health reform at the Department of Health and Human Services.

The C.B.O.’s assessment of a bill’s efficacy and costs strongly influences political debate, but the office does not publicly reveal how it calculates those numbers.

“We knew the numbers he gave us would be close to where the C.B.O. was likely to come out,” Ms. Tanden said. She was right.

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.

This assignment primarily involved asking his graduate student researchers to tweak his model’s software code. It was also almost entirely conducted from his home office, while his children were at school and then after they had gone to bed.

“If I wanted to be in Washington, I’d have taken a job in Washington,” he said. “I wanted to be around for my family.”

Even though he was brought in by the White House, Congressional staff members from both parties trusted him because he was seen as an econometric wonk, not a political agent. But soon his very involvement with the bill caused questions about his objectivity to be raised in the news media.

During and after the bill’s slog through Congress, he frequently spoke with reporters and wrote opinion pieces supporting the Affordable Care Act but did not always mention his role in helping to devise it.

He says he regrets not being more upfront about his involvement with the administration. But he does not apologize for publicly advocating the legislation, and continuing to do so — including through a comic book he wrote to explain the law.

“Yes, I want the public to be informed by an objective expert,” he says. “But the thing is, I know more about this law than any other economist.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/business/jonathan-gruber-health-cares-mr-mandate.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

If more citizens were armed, criminals would think twice about attacking them, Detroit Police Chief James Craig

Florida currently has more concealed-carry permit holders than any other state, with 1,269,021 issued as of May 14, 2014

The liberal elite ... know that the people simply cannot be trusted; that they are incapable of just and fair self-government; that left to their own devices, their society will be racist, sexist, homophobic, and inequitable -- and the liberal elite know how to fix things. They are going to help us live the good and just life, even if they have to lie to us and force us to do it. And they detest those who stand in their way."
- A Nation Of Cowards, by Jeffrey R. Snyder

Tavis Smiley: 'Black People Will Have Lost Ground in Every Single Economic Indicator' Under Obama

white-privilege.jpg?resize=318%2C318

Democrats>Socialists>Communists - Same goals, different speeds.

#DeplorableLivesMatter

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maybe if she'd read it she'd have seen the author's name :hehe:

* ~ * Charles * ~ *
 

I carry a gun because a cop is too heavy.

 

USE THE REPORT BUTTON INSTEAD OF MESSAGING A MODERATOR!

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The lack of Deniers commenting is amazing. Speaks volumes

Home run and all that stuff

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The lack of Deniers commenting is amazing. Speaks volumes

Home run and all that stuff

Wait until work hours ... 9-4 or what ever

The guy makes a few toxic you tube videos ... Insults the average American Now no one knows him . Including the kenyan

If more citizens were armed, criminals would think twice about attacking them, Detroit Police Chief James Craig

Florida currently has more concealed-carry permit holders than any other state, with 1,269,021 issued as of May 14, 2014

The liberal elite ... know that the people simply cannot be trusted; that they are incapable of just and fair self-government; that left to their own devices, their society will be racist, sexist, homophobic, and inequitable -- and the liberal elite know how to fix things. They are going to help us live the good and just life, even if they have to lie to us and force us to do it. And they detest those who stand in their way."
- A Nation Of Cowards, by Jeffrey R. Snyder

Tavis Smiley: 'Black People Will Have Lost Ground in Every Single Economic Indicator' Under Obama

white-privilege.jpg?resize=318%2C318

Democrats>Socialists>Communists - Same goals, different speeds.

#DeplorableLivesMatter

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Filed: K-1 Visa Country: China
Timeline

If more citizens were armed, criminals would think twice about attacking them, Detroit Police Chief James Craig

Florida currently has more concealed-carry permit holders than any other state, with 1,269,021 issued as of May 14, 2014

The liberal elite ... know that the people simply cannot be trusted; that they are incapable of just and fair self-government; that left to their own devices, their society will be racist, sexist, homophobic, and inequitable -- and the liberal elite know how to fix things. They are going to help us live the good and just life, even if they have to lie to us and force us to do it. And they detest those who stand in their way."
- A Nation Of Cowards, by Jeffrey R. Snyder

Tavis Smiley: 'Black People Will Have Lost Ground in Every Single Economic Indicator' Under Obama

white-privilege.jpg?resize=318%2C318

Democrats>Socialists>Communists - Same goals, different speeds.

#DeplorableLivesMatter

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Filed: K-1 Visa Country: China
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Well, they had to pass it first for her to find out what was in it. <_<

(the fact that we josh about someone as thoroughly incompetent as her in a seat of power is ... abysmal)

The liberal elite ... know that the people simply cannot be trusted; that they are incapable of just and fair self-government; that left to their own devices, their society will be racist, sexist, homophobic, and inequitable -- and the liberal elite know how to fix things. They are going to help us live the good and just life, even if they have to lie to us and force us to do it. And they detest those who stand in their way."

- A Nation Of Cowards, by Jeffrey R. Snyder

If more citizens were armed, criminals would think twice about attacking them, Detroit Police Chief James Craig

Florida currently has more concealed-carry permit holders than any other state, with 1,269,021 issued as of May 14, 2014

The liberal elite ... know that the people simply cannot be trusted; that they are incapable of just and fair self-government; that left to their own devices, their society will be racist, sexist, homophobic, and inequitable -- and the liberal elite know how to fix things. They are going to help us live the good and just life, even if they have to lie to us and force us to do it. And they detest those who stand in their way."
- A Nation Of Cowards, by Jeffrey R. Snyder

Tavis Smiley: 'Black People Will Have Lost Ground in Every Single Economic Indicator' Under Obama

white-privilege.jpg?resize=318%2C318

Democrats>Socialists>Communists - Same goals, different speeds.

#DeplorableLivesMatter

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