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Gruber referred callers Friday morning to the response he gave The New Republic, where he called his own 2012 comments “just a ‘speak-o’—you know, like a typo.”
“I honestly don’t remember why I said that. I was speaking off-the-cuff. It was just a mistake. People make mistakes. Congress made a mistake drafting the law and I made a mistake talking about it,” Gruber told the magazine.

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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/75077/how-they-did-it

How They Did It

May 21, 2010

EXCERPT

In the bleak political aftermath of Clintoncare’s defeat in 1994, the Democratic Party’s thinkers and strategists obsessed over how to get the policy and the politics right next time—...

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It was an idea that lived exclusively in academia until 2006, when political serendipity thrust it onto the Massachusetts state political agenda. Under a special arrangement the state had previously made with the federal government, it stood to lose billions in aid unless lawmakers found a way to increase the number of people with health insurance. Republican Mitt Romney, the consultant-turned-governor eager to burnish his reputation as a problem-solver, seized on the idea of creating these new regulated marketplaces and partnered with the Democratic legislature to pass it. The Massachusetts reforms eventually brought insurance coverage to 97 percent of the state, the highest such rate in the country. MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the plan’s architects, led a group of center-left intellectuals who hyped the experiment’s success and touted it as a model for national action in articles, speeches, and consultation with prominent Democratic Party politicians.

Liberals, though, continued to eye these schemes skeptically: They simply didn’t trust private insurance, even the highly regulated and subsidized version in Massachusetts. But soon, a new twist emerged, one promoted most visibly by Jacob Hacker, a political scientist then at the University of California, Berkeley. The idea was to throw a government-run insurance plan into the mix, not as the insurer for all, but simply as an option for people or businesses that wanted it. Backed by a prominent liberal think tank (the Economic Policy Institute) and a new, well-funded activist organization (Health Care for America Now), he pitched this “public option” as a way to provide competition with the private sector, while offering peace of mind to those who trusted government more than the anonymous medical reviewers at a behemoth like UnitedHealthcare. The idea became something of a litmus test for liberals; many not-so-secretly hoped the public plan was a big first step toward single-payer.

Conservative voters and most of the business community, naturally, had different priorities. They worried more about what high medical bills were doing to corporations and the federal budget. They feared liberal reforms would address the problem, if at all, through blunt price controls and rationing. But years of research, first developed at Dartmouth, suggested that as much as one-third of medical spending was waste—not paperwork or overhead, but care that simply didn’t make people better. Among those who noticed was Peter Orszag, a former Clinton administration economist who’d become director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Orszag was a fiscal conservative, but he’d come to realize the government’s long-term fiscal problem was largely a health care problem. And the Dartmouth research suggested that it was possible to reduce health care spending without actually reducing care—or, at least, reducing good care. Orszag, a fitness fanatic, became obsessed with this research—and, through his work, helped give it centrist credibility. A new, fragile consensus had emerged.

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Reform advocates and experts raised their eyebrows: Did this mean Obama wasn’t serious about reform? Was he paying too much attention to polls, which frequently showed that individual mandates were unpopular? Hillary Clinton hadn’t yet published her own plan. But she (along with Edwards) quickly seized on an estimate published in The New Republic, based on a rough calculation by MIT’s Gruber, that Obama’s plan would likely leave 15 million people without coverage because those people would opt not to buy insurance. Over the coming months, Clinton hammered Obama relentlessly on this point; Obama hit back with ads and mailers suggesting she’d make people buy insurance they couldn’t afford. It was a bit awkward: Former Senator Tom Daschle, an Obama confidant, had written his own book on health care and, like Cutler, had called for a mandate. But the gambit worked well—and Obama won the nomination.

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