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A consultant considered an architect to the federal health care law who said a “lack of transparency” and “stupidity of the American voter” were critical to getting it passed reportedly received $481,050 from the state of Michigan, and a recently elected state representative said he wants an investigation. Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who created an econometric model intended to project health care spending and costs under different assumptions, along with his team, was granted a $481,050 contract by the state of Michigan, according to the Washington Post. He was paid that to help set up state...

According to government data, the nearly $6 million in confirmed taxpayer dollars that Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber was paid from 2009 to 2014—about $1 million per year—is roughly 24 times the average salary earned by full-time American workers in the same general time frame. The average annual full-time U.S. salary was about $41,600 in those years, which multiplied 24 times is $998,400, or nearly $1 million a year. Gruber, who became famous last week from a video in which he admitted Obamacare was passed due to a “lack of transparency” and “the stupidity of the American voter,” has received at...

That’s not quite his verbatim quote, but it’s pretty darn close:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO “The problem is it’s a political nightmare, and people say ‘no, you can’t tax my benefits’…so what we did a lot in that room was think a lot about well how could we make this work? … And [Obama] is really a realistic guy. He was like, ‘look, I can’t just do this.’ He said ‘it’s just not going to happen politically. The bill will not pass. How do we manage to get there through phase-ins and other things?’ And we talked about...

Two well-placed sources on Capitol Hill say that the Congressional Budget Office effectively used Jonathan Gruber’s model to score Obamacare. That model favors government mandates over market competition and claims that essentially the only way to achieve a large reduction in the number of uninsured Americans is to impose an Obamacare-like individual mandate. Moreover, because the model that the CBO used in scoring Obamacare is the same one it uses today, any alternative to Obamacare that doesn’t include an individual mandate — which is to say, any conservative alternative — would be scored by the CBO as falling well short,...

National Institutes of Health paid him $2 million for Medicare consulting Justice Department has added $1.7 million for expert witness testimony Four US states combined to pay him another $1.6 million for advice about health care laws, and contracts for four more states were unavailable If those states followed suit, Gruber's haul would exceed $7.5 million Gruber has become a thorn in Democrats' sides since videos emerged of him candidly discussing how the Obama White House misled Americans to pass the Obamacare law

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber may not have been a household name, at least before this week, despite his being described as the “architect” of Obamacare and, previously, Romneycare in Massachusetts. He sparked a furor this week after video surfaced of his talking about the “stupidity” of the American people, among other insults aimed at the voting public. Now Republicans have pounced, inventing a brand-new word: “Grubering.” Here’s what you need to know about Gruber and the controversy that’s still swirling. I've heard the name Jonathan Gruber a lot this week, but what happened and who is he? He’s an MIT...

According to BarackObama.com, President Obama's official website, Jon Gruber "helped write Obamacare." The post was written in 2012 and was about specific quotes from President Obama trying to tie Mitt Romney to ObamaCare by saying that "RomneyCare" was the model for the Affordable Care Act. In an act to hide the connection to Barack Obama after Gruber's quotes about the "stupidity of American voters" went viral, the article has been taken down by Organizing for Action. However, it was online as recently as August of this year, and a cached version still exists that clearly shows its original content. Here...

In a 2011 conversation about the Affordable Care Act, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the law more commonly known as Obamacare, talked about how the bill would get rid of all tax credits for employer-based health insurance through "mislabeling" what the tax is and who it would hit. In recent days, the past comments of Gruber -- who in a 2010 speech noted that he "helped write the federal bill" and "was a paid consultant to the Obama administration to help develop the technical details as well" -- have been given renewed attention.

A new analysis by a leading MIT economist provides new ammunition for Democrats as the Senate begins formally debating the historic health-reform bill being pushed by President Barack Obama. The report concludes that under the Senate’s health-reform bill, Americans buying individual coverage will pay less than they do for today's typical individual market coverage, and would be protected from high out-of-pocket costs. So Democrats will argue that under the Senate bill, Americans would pay less for more. The new document arms Democrats with a response to the contention of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that the bill would mean...

As Congress voted on the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, in 2010, one of the bill's architects, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, told a college audience that those pushing the legislation pitched it as a bill that would control spiraling health care costs even though most of the bill was focused on something else and there was no guarantee the bill would actually bend the cost curve. In recent days, the past comments of Gruber -- who in this 2010 speech notes that he "helped write the federal bill" and "was a paid consultant to the Obama administration to help develop...

If you can’t cover it up anymore, turn it into a joke. President Obama poked fun at the checkered political history of his hometown Chicago on Tuesday, reminding voters in Wisconsin to vote early — but not often.“You can only vote once — this isn’t Chicago, now,” Obama said at a rally in Milwaukee for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke.Obama was brought in to fire up the Democratic base, traveling to a ward in which he carried 99 percent of the vote in the 2012 presidential contest against Republican Mitt Romney. At least it’s not one of those places where...

Covering pre-existing conditions and ‘essential benefits’ raising insurance plan costsThe Affordable Care Act was supposed to make health care more affordable, but a newly released study of insurance policies before and after Obamacare shows that average premiums have skyrocketed, for some groups by as much as 78 percent. Average insurance premiums in the sought-after 23-year-old demographic rose most dramatically, with men in that age group seeing an average 78.2 percent price increase before factoring in government subsidies, and women having their premiums rise 44.9 percent, according to a report by HealthPocket scheduled for release Wednesday. The study, which was shared...

The son of a former Virginia state senator has told federal investigators that U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner discussed the possibility of several jobs, including a federal judgeship, for the senator’s daughter in an effort to dissuade him from quitting the evenly divided state Senate.

Previously unpublished data from the last big election in Burlington, Vt., reveals a significant number of votes were cast by individuals whose names were not on the statewide checklist. In the 2012 presidential election, 17,383 votes were cast in Burlington, according to city-published data. According to data not published by the city, but made available to a reporter, 639 of those votes, or 3.7 percent, came from election day walk-in voters whose names were not on the voter rolls and whose registration status was unknown. As previously reported, votes by individuals whose names don’t appear on the checklist count whether...

The Justice Department is claiming, in a little-noticed court filing, that a federal agent had the right to impersonate a young woman online by creating a Facebook page in her name without her knowledge. Government lawyers also are defending the agent’s right to scour the woman’s seized cellphone and to post photographs — including racy pictures of her and even one of her young son and niece — to the phony social media account, which the agent was using to communicate with suspected criminals. The woman, Sondra Arquiett, who then went by the name Sondra Prince, first learned her identity...

Guess what happened to their hard drives...Late on Friday, when it was hoping no one would be paying attention, the IRS admitted that it had a few new problems on its hands.  ...Five new problems, to be precise.Basically, the agency claims it has "lost" the emails of five more agents and - will wonders never cease - they're all related to the Lois Lerner investigation.We know you're stunned, just as the AP was:  The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax...

Washington, DC – Despite early refusals to make available IT professionals who worked on Lois Lerner’s computer, Ways and Means Committee investigators have now learned from interviews that the hard drive of former IRS Exempt Organizations Director Lois Lerner was “scratched,” but data was recoverable. In fact, in-house professionals at the IRS recommended the Agency seek outside assistance in recovering the data. That information conflicts with a July 18, 2014 court filing by the Agency, which stated the data on the hard drive was unrecoverable – including multiple years’ worth of missing emails. “It is unbelievable that we cannot get...

A devastating new Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General report released on Tuesday reveals that the Obama administration has yet to determine whether 1,295,571 of the over 8 million Obamacare enrollees are U.S. citizens lawfully in the country. The finding, located on page 11 of the report, states that 44% of the remaining 2,611,780 application "inconsistencies" are related to verifying "Citizenship/national status/lawful presence." Another 960,492 application inconsistencies were related to verifying whether subsidy applicants provided accurate income information.

"If a judge is told by a party to decide his cases in a certain way, or one party can threaten the judge’s job if the case is not decided in that party’s favor, then this central pillar of our democratic society is corroded,” Petersen said at a recent hearing called by the Senate Law and Justice Committee.