MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, the Obamacare architect who bragged about deceiving the “stupid” American people to secure passage of the bill, has been paid an estimated $5.2 million by the federal government and 12 state governments for consulting services to assist in the design and implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
Breitbart News exchanged emails with Professor Gruber on Tuesday in
an attempt to confirm this estimate, but Gruber would neither confirm
nor deny the amounts.
“You have been paid in excess of $5.2 million for your economic
consulting services related to the design and implementation of
Obamacare by the federal government and 12 states, which include:
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Vermont, Michigan, West Virginia, Maine, Colorado,
Oregon, Connecticut, Delaware, Kansas, California,” Breitbart News
wrote in an e-mail to Gruber. “Could you confirm these facts put
together from press reports?” we asked.
"Thanks for writing," Gruber responded by email late Tuesday night. "I have no comment at this time. Sorry."
Gruber, who was eager to expound upon his role as the architect of
Obamacare in numerous public settings between 2009 and October 2014, has
offered the same empty response to most press inquiries since the first
video of his confessed deception broke on November 7. On November 8, he
appeared on the progressive-friendly Ronan Farrow program on MSNBC.
With that exception, the once talkative Gruber has now turned
incommunicado.
Breitbart’s estimate of $5.2 million is based on publicly available reports on
the amounts of Gruber's Obamacare design and implementation contracts
with the federal government ($392,600) and four states: Michigan
($481,050), Minnesota ($329,000), Vermont ($400,000), and Wisconsin
($400,000), as well as assumptions about contract sizes with eight
additional states with which Gruber has contracts: West Virginia, Maine,
Colorado, Oregon, Connecticut, Delaware, Kansas, and California. The
amount of those contracts has not been publicly reported:
As The Washington Post reported on
Friday, “It’s safe to say that about $400,000 appears to be the
standard rate for gaining access to the Gruber Microsimulation Model.”
Adding the $2 million from publicly disclosed contracts to the
estimated $3.2 million from known contracts whose amount have not yet
been publicly disclosed brings the current estimate of Gruber’s
Obamacare-related earnings to $5.2 million.
Gruber’s Obamacare-related financial bonanza is based, in part, on
the ubiquitous use of his proprietary Gruber Microsimulation Model in
virtually every executive and legislative entity involved in the design
and implementation of Obamacare: the White House, the Department of
Health and Human Services, the Congressional Budget Office (which is
charged with providing Congress “independent” analysis of the impact of
proposed legislation), and most state governments.
Gruber has essentially enjoyed a monopoly on economic analysis of
Obamacare since February 25, 2009, barely a month after President
Obama’s inauguration. On that date, the federal government issued a
public notice that “[t]he
Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Assistant Secretary for
Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), intends to negotiate with Jonathan
Gruber, Ph.D. on a sole sources basis for technical assistance in
evaluating options for national healthcare reform.”
According to Solicitation Number AES2009 for Technical Assistance in Evaluating Options for Health Reform,
“The basis for restricting competition is the authority 13.106-1(b)
because only one source is reasonably available to satisfy agency
requirements. The anticipated contract period will be for one year.”
In essence, someone in the Obama administration wanted to make
Gruber’s proprietary Gruber Microsimulation Model the “must have”
analytic tool not only for the federal government, but also for every
state government that would subsequently implement Obamacare after it
became law, something that would not become reality until a year later,
in March 2010.
It is unclear who in the Obama administration was behind this
effective grant of monopoly to Gruber. Though the solicitation stated
the contract was to be performed for the assistant secretary for
Planning and Evaluation, no one occupied that office on February 25,
2009, when the solicitation was issued.
The assistant secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department
of Health and Human Services position had been empty since its previous
occupant, now Senator-elect Ben Sasse (R-NE), resigned at the end of
the George W. Bush administration in January 2009. Due to political
difficulties encountered with President Obama’s first choice as
Secretary of Health and Human Services, former Senator Tom Daschle
(D-SD), none of the top positions at HHS were filled in February 2009.
President Obama did not nominate Kathleen Sebelius to be secretary of
Health and Human Services until April 2009. It was not until a month
later, in May 2009, that President Obama nominated Dr. Sherry Glied to
become the assistant secretary of Planning and Evaluation.
Who then authorized the sole source contract to Professor Gruber in February 2009?
On Tuesday evening, Breitbart News posed that question to Dr. Glied,
who is now the dean of the School of Public Service at New York
University.
“All this [the sole source Gruber contract] happened before I arrived
and I don't know who arranged it,” Glied emailed Breitbart News. “By
the time I arrived, I think the contract was over."
The most disturbing fact of the ubiquitous nature of the Gruber
Microsimulation Model is the degree to which it may have influenced the
economic model used by the Congressional Budget Office in March, 2010
when it delivered its faulty scoring analysis to Congress prior to the
passage of Obamacare that the bill would reduce the deficit over ten
years.
According to its enabling legislation, the Congressional Budget
Office is charged with providing Congress with “independent” analysis of
the budgetary and economic impact of major proposed legislation. But
CBO’s favorable scoring of Obamacare in its March 2010 analysis has led
several conservatives to question the degree to which that document was independently developed.
Not only are there questions surrounding the degree to which the CBO
model reflected the same biases found in the Gruber Microsimulation
Model used by the Obama administration, two of the economists on its
staff charged with implementation of that model were protégés and former
Phd. students at MIT of Professor Gruber, as first reported by the Weekly Standard.
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