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April 26, 2007 -

"As of April 12, 2006, Jonathan Gruber became the most influential economist in Massachusetts government. That was the day Gov. Mitt Romney signed a sweeping health care reform law that had Gruber’s distinct fingerprints on it. Of course, at the Faneuil Hall bill-signing ceremony the cameras focused on Romney and key legislative leaders-and on U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who flew in for the event. But it was Gruber, 41, a professor of economics at MIT, who had pushed from the beginning for a new state requirement that all residents of the Commonwealth carry health insurance.

In addition to this first-in-the-nation individual mandate, the law created a new state authority to oversee the re-making of the health care market, and Gruber was named one of 10 board members of the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority. So this MIT professor’s work in health care economics has already directly affected many thousands of lives in Massachusetts.

In the year since the enactment of the law, well more than 100,000 state residents have been newly covered by health insurance, either by expanded Medicaid or through the new Commonwealth Care plan, which offers subsidized insurance for those who make up to three times the federal poverty line level (up to about $60,000 for a family of four). By this July, all residents are legally required to carry health insurance, though Gruber says it won’t be worth looking at numbers until mid 2008 to see how close to universal coverage we are, since full compliance won’t happen without a good deal more publicity. Meanwhile, Gruber has been called in to advise other states—including California and Minnesota-to help them devise plans to expand health insurance coverage.

Gruber’s role in Massachusetts health care reform began without fanfare. After working in Washington in 1997 and 1998 as an economic policy advisor for the U.S. Treasury Department, Gruber returned to MIT, where he has been a professor since 1992, and developed a health care “micro-simulation model.” The idea was to build a computer program that would predict the results of various health care changes......." Tough medicine

Nov 14, 2014 "......In 2009, just one month after President Obama took office, the Department of Health and Human Services put out a sole-source solicitation titled “Technical Assistance in Evaluating Options for Health Reform.” The contract would be with Gruber, who the document said was the only person “reasonably available to satisfy agency requirements.”

As the agency put it, “Dr. Gruber developed a proprietary statistically sophisticated micro-simulation model that has the flexibility to ascertain the distribution of changes in health care spending and public and private sector health care costs due to a large variety of changes in health insurance benefit design, public program eligibility criteria, and tax policy.”........... Washington Post

I believe “micro-simulation model” is a technical term meaning “manipulating numbers in the service of liberal politicians”.

It is capable of showing lower unemployment, despite fewer jobs and more job seekers.

It can reliably predict the weather in Boston on July 23, 2116, though it is worthless for telling you if it will rain this afternoon.

It demonstrates that a higher minimum wage and more generous unemployment benefits produce lower unemployment.

It proves that 2 + 2 = 5, or seven or the square root of -1, or any other result Comrade Obama requires.

It has a unique property: one inputs the results and it returns the results wrapped in scientism and statistical significance and authority wrapped in a neatly packaged sciency linear regression bow.

It can infallibly predict the delusions and dreams of bureaucrats and liberal politicians, unerringly foresee our common ineluctable future, but it can never explain the ever changing past.

If you are the only person who can produce a given result, regardless of your degrees or position, you are probably deluded or a charlatan.