Left Covers Up Gruber Deceits With, Get This, More Deceit

Lies all the way down.

Oh, and Megan McArdle sums up the advantages of Obamacare this way:

No one likes [Obamacare's] structure. Its sole virtues over basically any other possible plan were that it scored well with the Congressional Budget Office and that it was too confusing for voters to understand what was going on. Those are not high recommendations for a national health-care policy.

Oh, and here's an important fact I didn't know: Jon Gruber was paid by the government to figure out how to fool the CBO into scoring various taxes as not being taxes.

When he speaks about deceiving the CBO and the American public, he is not being glib. That is precisely his area of expertise.

In 2009, just one month after President Obama took office, the Department of Health and Human Services put out a sole-source solicitation titled "Technical Assistance in Evaluating Options for Health Reform." The contract would be with Gruber, who the document said was the only person "reasonably available to satisfy agency requirements."

As the agency put it, "Dr. Gruber developed a proprietary statistically sophisticated micro-simulation model that has the flexibility to ascertain the distribution of changes in health care spending and public and private sector health care costs due to a large variety of changes in health insurance benefit design, public program eligibility criteria, and tax policy."

The model, the Gruber Microsimulation Model, is the coin of the realm, in large part because it is similar to the model used by the Congressional Budget Office. That means administration policy-makers could predict with reasonable certainty how CBO would score legislation. Given that legislation in Washington often falls or rises depending on the CBO score, that made this model a very powerful tool for administration officials.

So you paid Dr. Gruber $400,000 for his expertise in tutoring the government to serve more effective false propaganda to you.

posted by Ace at 12:44 PM

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