The Truth about Jonathan Gruber

Jonathan Cohn Rewrites History for Jonathan Gruber

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Tuesday November 18, 2014 8:49 am

Jonathan Cohn claims Gruber never hid his conflict of interest while pretending to be an outside expert in media interviews.

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This is simply not true. The New York Times point blank asked Gruber if he had any conflict of interests before letting him pen an op-ed and he signed a contract claiming he did not. The New York Times eventually issued a correction about his op-ed and put the blame squarely on Gruber for lying to them in writing. If that doesn’t count as “hiding,” I don’t know what  does.

Cohn goes on to pretend that while Gruber was hiding his relationship with the HHS, he was offering rather pessimistic analyses of the Affordable Care Act when in reality he was being a hyperbolic cheerleader for the law.

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At the time Gruber was stretching the truth beyond its breaking point to help sell the ACA. Gruber told Ron Brownstein, “My summary is it’s really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can’t think of a thing to try that they didn’t try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here…”

This article deeply angered me at the time, because Gruber’s statement was provably false. This was not the sober analysis of an outside expert.

During this time I was fighting for Democrats to include several progressive provisions the CBO had previously scored as significant cost control measures like a robust public option, drug re-importation, and direct drug price negotiation. Provisions that would have saved taxpayers hundreds of billions.

The Obama administration was actively using Gruber’s hyperbolic statements about the law’s cost control to undermine the case for these progressive policies. They made it seem like the Obama team had already done enough on cost control. This helped Obama mostly avoid talking about proven cost control measures like drug re-importation which Obama promised to kill in his secret deals with PhRMA.

It was very convenient for Obama that when Gruber claimed “I can’t think of a thing to try that they didn’t try,” he must have forgotten about these provisions Obama had already secretly taken off the table.

You see, what they call a “gaffe” in D.C. is when someone accidently tells the truth.  When Gruber said, “The lack of transparency in the law was instrumental in getting it passed because of the stupidity of the American voter”, he was telling the truth.  Here’s what Howard Dean had to say on Morning Joe–

The problem is not that he said it. The problem is that he thinks it. I’m serious. The core problem under the damn law is it was put together by a bunch of elitists who don’t really fundamentally understand the American people. That’s what the problem is.