Posted on 12/08/2014 5:16:25 AM PST by RoosterRedux
For just about everyone else who has dealt with Gruber, though—Democrats, academics, policy wonks, and the health care reporters who used to call him regularly for catchy quotes about what the latest Obamacare development really means—the videos are just head-scratchers. He’s a smart guy, everyone says, and he has been a hugely successful economist who clearly knows his health care policy. So they’re all coming back to the same question: Why the hell would he say that? Does he really believe it?
The answer, according to the people who know Gruber best, is that he has always been someone who is two seconds away from putting his foot in his mouth. Yes, he has had an astonishing rise in the world of health care policy—and it’s completely deserved, in their view, because of his groundbreaking work on predicting the cost impact of different kinds of health care legislation. Gruber is the man who developed an economic model that could basically work like a faster Congressional Budget Office—a huge help to congressional staffers as they drafted the Affordable Care Act, as well as the Massachusetts policymakers who wrote Mitt Romney’s health care reform law that preceded it.
But politically savvy? No, no, no. Gruber is a chatty, affable guy, but he’s also a man with no filter—and he knows it. It’s always when he drifts away from economics, and tries to talk about politics, that he gets into trouble, colleagues say. That’s where Gruber stepped on so many land mines in those videos—claiming there was a strategy to hide uncomfortable details from voters, as if he knew the political strategy and not just the economics, and that the “stupidity of the American voter” allowed them to get away with it.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
Last month’s election showed how smart most voters are.
The article sounds like a diagnosis.
IMHO
Gruber was a loose canon so impressed with his own influence he forgot to lie
It’s a pity he hasn’t spent his life analyzing why health care is so expensive in the US compared to other countries. An economic model to reduce costs would be very useful.
Spin to downplay Mr. Gruber.....
Gruber was dumped on us and played up for some reason.
Was he dumped on us as a figure we can hate and be angry about to divert us from being angry about the Republicans who have no intention of reversing Obamacare?
Gruber seems to hurt Obama for the moment but as has been pointed out, he worked for Mitt Romney to develop Mitt’s statewide version in Massachusetts.
A slick politician could dump that on Romney during a presidential debate in 2016. Gruber may serve Hillary’s interests in the end.
Except it appears the GOP suits aren’t listening.
Lefties deconstructing Gruber. If nothing, the moonbats are predictable as they circle..
‘claiming there was a strategy to hide uncomfortable details from voters’
Even though the lies of the MSM are so well known, occasionally they let slip a whopper of such magnitude as to still be shocking.
The MSMer writing the article says there was no strategy to hide rotten Obamacare details from voters, and no reliance of voter stupidity to get away with it.
Maybe it’s not a lie. Maybe the writer is honestly that clueless. The average MSM journalist’s IQ is fairly low.
The problem progressives are ultimate going to have is that it is built on lies (progs lie to themselves, to each other, and to the voters)...and eventually the truth has a way of coming out.
Hopefully, I live long enough to see the truth about Obama’s birth origin to come out and to see that man in prison. Just once in my life I would like God to measure out swift justice.
Well, some people occasionally tell the truth.
To Politico, and to DC-World in general, I know this seems strange, but way out here, it's a fact.
“It’s a pity he hasn’t spent his life analyzing why health care is so expensive in the US compared to other countries.”
The short answer is regulation. Start with the FDA, the way it works is Company A has a test regimen. It’s theirs alone and they lobby Congress to get their regimen included in any drug certification. Now, a drug company must come to them as the sole provider. (Attach price tag to rocket.) Several years ago the cost to certify one drug was in the billions.
Now, why are drugs so cheap in other countries, regulation. Pfizer creates Damitol. The FDA approves it, but we have treaties with other countries who control their prices. Pfizer makes allotments of Damitol at a lower than cost price and sends them to pharmacies in, say, Canada. The Canadian government sets the price to Canadians at, say, $1/pill. But the internet price from Canada is, say, $5/pill, well under the US pharmacy price of, say, $10/pill. The Canadian pharmacies sell a small quantity to Canadians, but the bulk of the drug goes at high profit to American’s buying over the internet.
This is just one example. When you dig into the knot it gets bigger and bigger. Nobody has a sword sharp enough or long enough to cut through.
The GOPe will let him slide. Nothing to see here...
The Dems desperately want to get rid of the albatross.
If they weren’t all atheists they’d be praying that SCOTUS will scuttle the turkey.
At that point they’ll be looking for a scapegoat, and obviously it’s not gonna be Obama. Gruber is tailor made to go under the bus.
Commies can’t objectively analyze why US healthcare was previously so expensive, to do so would show government intervention is a cost driver and that would undermine the meme that capitalism is bad and only the government has solutions to social issues.
trust gruber on economics
—except that people do not understand economics
so don’t listen to gruber on economics, listen to journalists who can interpret it for the voters
don’t trust gruber on politics
—instead, trust politicians, for example, pelosi and sebelius
who lied when they were asked if they knew gruber and denied it
and of course journalists
except when journalists wrote that gruber was an obamacare architect (they, uh, we erred on that)
and just about every obamacare staffer will tell you the same
just ask this teddy kennedy staffer!
so bottom line
don’t listen to gruber
got it?
lol
The only way Obamacare topples is if the sheeperal can be made to accept (if not admit) that it
DOES NOT HELP PEOPLE
and they are not “a good person” for supporting it.
So which is it?
His models predicted that families would save $2,500 per year, or they predicted that everyone's costs would rise and then they lied about saving $2,500 per year to get the bill passed?
-PJ
Agree. & one of the exact deceptions intentionally written into the law was the delayed implementation of the worst and most punishing aspects of it. It was deliberately designed to offer a few supposed goodies upfront, and save the devastating stuff for later. That right there was outright slimy & underhanded. The hope of course was that the law would be too embedded by the time the most pernicious elements surfaced, and we’d be stuck with it.
The way Boehner and McConnell are going about it, we may be stuck with it regardless.
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