Obama, Gruber were on the same page from the beginning

Although President Obama and other top Democrats are enthusiastically distancing themselves from the revealing remarks of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber, the history of the healthcare law suggests that the Obama administration very well knew that millions of Americans would not be able to keep their healthcare plans once the law took effect.

Gruber, under a $400,000 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), created economic models to explain how Obamacare would sustain itself financially, infamously observing that a degree of legerdemain would be both necessary and achievable, thanks to the “stupidity” of the American voter.

His model, of course, relied on Obamacare’s legal requirement that all Americans buy government-approved health insurance or pay a penalty — the so-called individual mandate, a cornerstone of the Affordable Care Act. He defended the mandate in a 2009 analysis (H/T: Pj Tattler):

I have developed the Gruber microsimulation model to estimate how health reforms would affect insurance markets; this is a very similar model to the one the Congressional Budget Office used to score the PPACA, and my model derives very similar to CBO. I can use this model to consider what would happen if Congress removed the mandate while keeping all other aspects of the law intact. I find that:

▪ Total insurance coverage would rise by fewer than 10 million persons rather than the 32 million persons estimated by CBO. The number of uninsured would be reduced by less than 20 percent rather than by about two-thirds.
▪ Employer-sponsored insurance, which is projected to erode by about 5 million persons under reform, would instead erode by over 20 million persons.

“Erode,” of course, means “lose your health coverage as it currently exists” — a direct contradiction to the president’s false boast that anyone who liked their healthcare plan would be able, under Obamacare, to keep it. Period.

“[N]ot only did he [Obama] seemingly forget that he has already admitted to a provision of the health care law having not been ‘extensively debated’ and ‘fully transparent,'” PJ Tattler’s David Steinberg wrote Monday, “it was Jonathan Gruber himself who originally advised the administration that Obamacare would cause millions of Americans to lose their plans.”

Democrats have been grappling with buyer’s remorse, where Gruber is concerned, ever since the first of several incendiary Gruber statements ahead of the Obamacare rollout went viral. Not only do Gruber’s pre-rollout remarks reveal Obamacare’s sales job to have been a willful obfuscation of the truth, they also belie — at best — a profound lack of ethical judgment.

“[I]n January 2010, Gruber was penning op-ed pieces in the Washington Post and New York Times advocating for Obamacare, without having disclosed to his editors that he received nearly $400,000 from the [Obama] administration to produce an ‘objective analysis,’ that would be used in promoting the legislation,” Watchdog noted Sunday.