In Washington, D.C. it is said that the
cover-up is almost always worse than the crime. Certainly, the tortured attempts by supporters of Obamacare to explain away the comments of health analyst Jonathan Gruber — that the law only passed because of a “lack of transparency” that became a “huge political advantage” because of “the stupidity of the American voter” — are more preposterous than even the worst parts of Obamacare.
President Obama himself tried to dismiss Gruber on Sunday by claiming he was just “some adviser who never worked on our staff.” He insisted his comments are “not a reflection on the actual process that was run.”
Hmmm. Gruber visited the White House nearly twenty times, according to official visitor logs. The White House actively promoted his work on Obamacare and touted his testimony to Senate committees as “objective analysis.” The Washington Post reported that Gruber’s model of the law’s costs was “the coin of the realm” in the debate and “a very powerful tool for administration officials,” for which he as paid nearly $400,000 in taxpayer money.
In reality, an analysis of media coverage by The Weekly Standard concluded “an overwhelming number of the ostensibly independent statements or scores that were made or published in support of Obamacare . . . were traceable to the support of one man and his model. And that man was Jonathan Gruber, who was secretly under contract with the Obama administration.”
This is serious. There have been flim-flam attempts to sell legislation in the past — the Left is now trying to distract attention from Gruber’s comments by citing passage of the Bush administration’s Medicare prescription-drug benefit in 2003. But there are some key differences. Despite its many shortcomings, the Bush prescription-drug benefit wound up being that rare government program that wound up costing substantially less than the predictions that were made at the time of its passage. And it didn’t involve the sweeping stranglehold on one-sixth of the nation’s economy that Obamacare entailed.
Read the full article:
Gruber’s Deception | National Review Online
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