Saturday, January 9, 2010

But are they getting their money's worth?

Full disclosure: we are not being payed nor are we receiving compensation in any form from the Republican National Committee or any branches or elements of the Tea Party movement for our blogging.



Dr. Jonathan Gruber, a health economist from M.I.T. has been one of Obamacare’s most cited proponents in both print and electronic media. Gruber was also one the most prominent analysts to rebut an insurance industry report in October claiming premiums would shoot up if healthcare reform passed. That’s all well and good except for one thing:

He is under contract with the Department of Health and Human Services for technical assistance in evaluating options for national healthcare reform to the tune of $297,000. Gruber has never disclosed this arrangement.

So is it out and out corruption that an independent analyst is essentially being paid by the federal government to shill for the President’s crown legislative jewel or just more of the transparency we’ve come to expect from this administration?

And what exactly was Gruber being paid to do?

Moreover, in order to estimate the impacts, 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.


Exit question: does that sound like something you would want inserted into you?

1 comment:

K T Cat said...

Great. We're paying some dude $300K to write spaghetti code analysis tools that produce whatever we want them to produce. Meanwhile, the watchdog media like 60 Minutes licks the sweat off of Obama's spheroids.

Sounds like Climategate all over again.