I’m not sure if you’re familiar with FireDogLake or not, the lefty blog run by Jane Hamsher. (Think of it as sort of Daily Kos, Jr., and you wouldn’t be far wrong.)
Well, you may not remember, but there was a time in 2010 when Firedoglake and other liberals were fighting against what would become ObamaCare on the grounds that it was a giant taxpayer subsidy for insurance companies (correct) and that it simply wasn’t liberal enough, falling short of their goal of fully socializing the entire American medical system (AKA “single player”).
So back then, Hamsher was deeply skeptical of how ObamaCare was constructed, and did an analysis of the role one Jonathan Gruber had in crafting and selling the law.
How deeply was Gruber involved? Up to his eyeballs:
Up until this point, most of the attention regarding the failure to disclose the connection between Jonathan Gruber and the White House has fallen on Gruber himself. Far more troubling, however, is the lack of disclosure on the part of the White House, the Senate, the DNC and other Democratic leaders who distributed Gruber’s work and cited it as independent validation of their proposals, orchestrating the appearance of broad consensus when in fact it was all part of the same effort.
The White House is placing a giant collective bet on Gruber’s “assumptions” to justify key portions of the Senate bill, which they allowed people to believe was independent verification. Now that we know that Gruber’s work was not that of an independent analyst but rather work performed as a contractor to the White House and paid for by taxpayers, it should be made publicly available so others can judge its merits.
Throughout the piece, Hamsher highlights the numerous times when the Democratic Party and their allies in the media purport to “analyze” the effects of ObamaCare on a wide variety of economic metrics, when in fact all the disparate “analyses” all points back to Gruber’s work.
And how’s this for a prophetic sentence?
Though Gruber’s analysis has been cited as support that insurance would be affordable, it appears that the individual mandate will impose a financial burden on middle class families that will leave them with no ability to make the co-pays necessary to use the insurance they are forced to buy.
While the Hamsher piece doesn’t uncover whether Gruber actual drafted specific language that made it’s way into ObamaCare, her piece does make clear that not only was Gruber used by the White House, congressional Democrats and the media to sell ObamaCare, he was the central figure in selling ObaamaCare’s “cost savings” to the public:
What was Gruber’s role in crafting the Senate bill? Nobody will say. Is he in effect grading his own work when he praises the bill? We don’t know. What we do know is that the White House engaged an expert who was quite likely to reach the conclusions he reached, because he’d been making similar claims for years. And they worked hard to promote his work as independent validation of their plan, when in fact he was an integral part of it.
In light of this, it’s rather amazing the degree of amnesia that’s swept Democrats and their MSM lackeys over Gruber’s central role in ObamaCare. Even more amazing is the fact they think the public will actually buy those denials. Then again, as Gruber himself noted, lack of transparency and deceiving those “stupid” voters was central part of Democrats’ ObamaCare plans from the beginning…
(Note: When I tried to pull up this piece yesterday, I got a persistent error, and wondered on Twitter why Firedoglake had memory holed the piece, and went and found an archive in the Wayback Machine. Well, either that was a transient error, or they thought better of memory holing it, as it is now back up. The Wayback Machine link is here just in case it disappears again…)