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15 Feb ’12
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this really makes my blood boil, and Angus King can go to hell for the record
Economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the Obama administration's consultants on the Affordable Care Act, is under attack from conservatives for comments he made last year in which he said the "stupidity of the American voter" was a factor in passing Obamacare in 2010.
The comments were made during the panel sessions at the Annual Health Economics Conference last year. A video of the panel began circulating Monday on conservative media. (Skip to about the 20:25 mark for the relevant comments.)
"This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes," he said during a panel discussion at the University of Pennsylvania in October, 2013. "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the 'stupidity of the American voter' or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”
Gruber's comments were part of a broader public conversation between him and economist Mark Pauly on the economics of health care reform. Gruber was responding to a remark by Pauly about financing transparency in the law and the politics surrounding the ACA's individual mandate. The political process, he said, striking a critical tone, resulted in inefficiencies in the law which should be corrected.
"In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which explicitly said that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed," he said. "You can't do it politically, you just literally cannot do it. It's not only transparent financing but also transparent spending."
On Tuesday, conservatives tore into Gruber's 2013 remarks, saying they served as an admission of intentional deceit by the Affordable Care Act's architects.
"There you go, America. That is what the Democrat Party thinks of you," Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show Monday, according to a transcript of the show. "They think most people are incompetent and will make the wrong decisions if living a life of self-reliance."
Social media lit up with posts about the comments on Monday and Tuesday, with several lawmakers weighing in as well.
Rep. Bill Cassidy, who is challenging Sen. Mary Landrieu in a Senate rrunoff election next month, seized on the comments to ding his Democratic rival."The architect of ObamaCare says it passed because voters are stupid. Does Landrieu think that about #LAsen voters?" he wrote on twitter.
"The crafting of Obamacare - amazing to hear their approach," wrote Rep. Jason Chaffetz on Twitter, linking to the clip of Gruber's comments.
In the video, Gruber appeared to be speaking specifically about the political environment in 2010 and its impact on the law’s funding mechanisms. Gruber takes a critical stance on some of those outcomes, calling them "irrational."
"I wish Mark was right and we could make it all transparent but I'd rather have this law than not," Gruber said. "That involves tradeoffs that we don't prefer as economists but are realistic."
On Tuesday Morning Independent Sen. Angus King, who caucuses with the Democrats, had a tense exchange with Fox News anchor Brian Kilmeade on air about the remark.
“I certainly don't endorse those kind of comments. But I can recall that debate. I wasn't in office. [I]t was a very vigorous debate,” King said when asked about Gruber’s comments. “Everybody knew that there were going to be additional taxes required to support the support for premiums under the Affordable Care Act. I don't see it as any deep, dark conspiracy. There were all kinds of -- there was long debate about it on both sides.”
“Really? He said he wasn't transparent. Senator, he said he wasn't transparent,” Kilmeade pushed back, beginning a tense exchange between himself and the senator.
“We've got eight million people that have insurance now, that didn't before. And don't lecture me about this. Because 40 years ago, I had insurance. If I hadn't had it – it caught a cancer that saved my life,” said King.
Gruber apologized for his comments on Tuesday afternoon during an on-air interview with MSNBC's Ronan Farrow.
“The comments in the video were made at an academic conference,” Gruber said. “I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately and I regret having made those comments.”
Although Gruber apologized for the language he used, Gruber said that the larger point he was trying to make centered on the political pressures that shaped the law. He added that those pressures "led to an incomplete law with some typos.”
“It would have made more sense to do Obamacare the way we did in Massachusetts, which would be to just give people money to offset the cost of their health insurance,” Gruber said. “That was politically infeasible and so instead it was done through the tax code.”
15 Feb ’12
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actually maybe he's right
A meme making its way around social media, sent to PolitiFact by a reader, captured the frustration many Americans felt. The meme said, "11% approval ratings. 96.4% re-elected" -- in other words, Congress has 11 percent approval ratings, yet 96.4 percent of incumbent lawmakers were re-elected in 2014. The text was superimposed over a photograph of the House chamber in the Capitol.
We wondered whether that was true, so we took a look.
Does Congress have 11 percent approval ratings?
While the meme features a picture of the House chamber, the most common polling question refers to Congress generally, rather than the House specifically, so we looked at Congress’ approval ratings overall. We found congressional approval scores from October 2014 from five different pollsters on the poll-archive websitePollingReport.com:
• Fox News: "Do you approve or disapprove of the job Congress is doing?" 13 percent said "approve."
• CBS News: "Do you approve or disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job?" 14 percent said "approve."
• CNN/ORC: "Do you approve or disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job?" 13 percent said "approve."
• ABC News/Washington Post: "Do you approve or disapprove of the way the U.S. Congress is doing its job?" 20 percent said "approve."
• NBC News/Wall Street Journal: "In general, do you approve or disapprove of the job that Congress is doing?" 12 percent said "approve."
That averages out to 14 percent -- slightly higher than 11 percent, but in the same, miserable ballpark.
Were 96.4 percent of congressional incumbents re-elected?
To be consistent with the polling, which covers Congress broadly, we’ll lump together the incumbent winning percentages in both the House and Senate. There are a few contests still to be decided, but there are enough settled that we can make a pretty close count.
In the House, we counted 390 incumbents who ran on Election Day. Of those, four haven’t had their races called as of Nov. 10, so we’ll set them aside. Of the remaining 386 incumbents, 373 won, for a winning percentage of 96.6 percent.
If you add in three incumbents who ran but lost in primaries, the incumbent winning percentage drops to 95.9 percent.
Meanwhile, in the Senate, 23 out of 26 incumbents won, with one more (Alaska’s Mark Begich, a Democrat) trailing in a race that has not yet been called, and another (Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu, also a Democrat) heading into a runoff.
If you don’t include Begich and Landrieu, the combined House-Senate incumbent winning percentage is 95.4 percent. If you do include them, it falls slightly to 95 percent.
All of these percentages are exceedingly close to the meme’s stated 96.4 percent, and they’re a moving target due to late-called races. So we won’t quibble.
Our ruling
The meme said that Congress has 11 percent approval ratings, yet 96.4 percent of incumbent lawmakers were re-elected.
We found small differences in the actual percentages -- Congress had roughly a 14 percent approval rate, and the incumbent re-election rate may be as low as 95 percent -- but the point of the meme is solid. Voters hold Congress in low regard, yet they re-elect almost everyone. So we rate the claim True.
4 Mar ’12
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mainly due to the rigged voting machines.
15 Feb ’12
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farmboy2 said
mainly due to the rigged voting machines.
15 Feb ’12
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will be interesting to see how this turns out
15 Feb ’12
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WASHINGTON — Jonathan Gruber, the health economist whose incendiary comments about “the stupidity of the American voter” have embarrassed the Obama administration, apologized Tuesday for what he described as his “glib, thoughtless and sometimes downright insulting comments.”
“I am not a political adviser nor a politician,” said Dr. Gruber, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of technology who was a paid consultant to the Obama administration in 2009-10.
Dr. Gruber minimized his role, saying he had used an “economic microsimulation model” to help the administration and Democrats in Congress assess the impact of policies in the Affordable Care Act. He later defended the law in a number of speeches. In one, he said the law had been adopted thanks in part to the stupidity of voters and a “lack of transparency” about its financing.
Testifying on Tuesday before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Dr. Gruber said: “I behaved badly, and I will have to live with that, but my own inexcusable arrogance is not a flaw in the Affordable Care Act. The A.C.A. is a milestone accomplishment for our nation that already has provided millions of Americans with health insurance.”
The chairman of the committee, Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, said supporters of the law had passed it and sold it to the public with half-truths and deception. He said that Dr. Gruber and the administration had displayed “a pattern of intentionally misleading the public about the true nature and impact of Obamacare.”
The senior Democrat on the committee, Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, joined in the criticism of Dr. Gruber. He said the professor’s comments were “absolutely stupid” and “incredibly disrespectful.” Worse, he said, Dr. Gruber’s statements gave Republicans “a political gift in the relentless campaign to tear down the Affordable Care Act.”
At the hearing, Mr. Issa showed a video in which Dr. Gruber suggested that supporters of the health law had written it in such a way that the Congressional Budget Office would not count required premium payments as tax revenue.
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure C.B.O. did not score the mandate as taxes,” Dr. Gruber said in the video, from October 2013. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the ‘stupidity of the American voter’ or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”
Dr. Gruber told the committee on Tuesday that he had made “insulting and mean comments that are totally uncalled for in any situation.”
“It is never appropriate to try to make oneself seem more important or smarter by demeaning others,” Dr. Gruber said. “I know better. I knew better. I am embarrassed, and I am sorry.”
Another witness, Marilyn B. Tavenner, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, also found herself on the defensive.
She acknowledged on Tuesday that she had made a mistake when she told the committee in September that 7.3 million people were enrolled in private health insurance plans through the exchanges.
About 400,000 people with medical and dental insurance plans were “inadvertently counted twice,” she said, so “the number of individuals enrolled in medical coverage plans was approximately 6.9 million,” not 7.3 million.
“While this mistake was regrettable, it shouldn’t obscure the fact that the Affordable Care Act is working,” Ms. Tavenner said. “We have seen a dramatic decrease in the number of uninsured Americans and exceptionally low growth across a wide variety of measures of health care costs.”
Ms. Tavenner also responded to criticism from federal investigators who have identified many security weaknesses in HealthCare.gov, the website for the federal insurance exchange.
“We remain committed to stringent privacy and security protocols to protect consumers’ personally identifiable information,” Ms. Tavenner said. “Consumers can use the marketplace with confidence that their personal information is secure.”
She said the government conducted daily security tests to prevent misuse of the website, which asks consumers to submit huge amounts of personal information.
15 Feb ’12
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well, well, well. Man I love karma
MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — A Massachusetts Institute of Technology health economist who made national headlines last year for talking about “the stupidity of the American voter” was a target Monday in a report from the Vermont state auditor saying the economist may have padded his bills to the state.
Auditor of Accounts Douglas Hoffer said he referred his findings on Jonathan Gruber and his contract with the state to Attorney General William Sorrell. Hoffer said Gruber’s invoices billed Vermont $100 per hour for the work of a research assistant — 1,000 hours in 10 weeks.
“To do so, the RA would have worked exclusively on this project for more than 14 hours per day — every day,” the auditor said. “The evidence suggests that Dr. Gruber overstated the hours worked by the RA and that the Agency of Administration ignored the obvious signs that something was amiss.”
The attorney general said in an interview that Hoffer raised “serious questions.”
Gruber said in an email Monday he did not wish to comment.
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