Krauthammer on Gruber and perhaps the end of obamacare

Discussion in 'Politics' started by jem, Nov 17, 2014.

  1. dbphoenix

    dbphoenix

    So before the ACA, these 50 laws were identical in this respect?
     
    #21     Nov 18, 2014
  2. loyek590

    loyek590

    yes, in that particular respect, and the laws still exist and must be obeyed whether you have Obamacare or any other insurance he will still allow you to buy
     
    #22     Nov 18, 2014
  3. dbphoenix

    dbphoenix

    Remarkable that all 50 states would have had such laws well before the enactment of the ACA. I guess all those reports I've read over the years have been pure fiction. I wonder why the insurance companies haven't sued for libel?
     
    #23     Nov 18, 2014
  4. loyek590

    loyek590

    once again, either produce or shut up, give me an example of someone who had their health insurance cancelled because they got sick. It should be easy to find in all those reports you researched.
     
    #24     Nov 18, 2014
  5. dbphoenix

    dbphoenix

    I didn't research any. I've been reading them all my life. But if you say they aren't true, you must know what you're talking about. You're so clear-headed.

    Even so, you might find this interesting: http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/06/16/health.care.hearing/
     
    Last edited: Nov 18, 2014
    #25     Nov 18, 2014
  6. jem

    jem

    Gruber’s Deception
    There’s a reason the Left is recoiling from him.
    By John Fund
    • In Washington, D.C. it is said that the cover-up is almost always worse than the crime. Certainly, the tortured attempts by supporters of Obamacare to explain away the comments of health analyst Jonathan Gruber — that the law only passed because of a “lack of transparency” that became a “huge political advantage” because of “the stupidity of the American voter” — are more preposterous than even the worst parts of Obamacare.

      President Obama himself tried to dismiss Gruber on Sunday by claiming he was just “some adviser who never worked on our staff.” He insisted his comments are “not a reflection on the actual process that was run.”

      In reality, an analysis of media coverage by The Weekly Standard concluded “an overwhelming number of the ostensibly independent statements or scores that were made or published in support of Obamacare . . . were traceable to the support of one man and his model. And that man was Jonathan Gruber, who was secretly under contract with the Obama administration.”

      This is serious. There have been flim-flam attempts to sell legislation in the past — the Left is now trying to distract attention from Gruber’s comments by citing passage of the Bush administration’s Medicare prescription-drug benefit in 2003. But there are some key differences. Despite its many shortcomings, the Bush prescription-drug benefit wound up being that rare government program that wound up costing substantially less than the predictions that were made at the time of its passage. And it didn’t involve the sweeping stranglehold on one-sixth of the nation’s economy that Obamacare entailed.

      Democrats are now recoiling from efforts to get them to comment on Gruber the way Dracula recoils from a cross. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, flabbergasted reporters last week. “I don’t know who he is,” Pelosi said of Gruber. “He didn’t help write our bill.” But she herself had touted his analysis on her website in at least seven places, praised him at congressional meetings, and opened doors to him on Capitol Hill. Video has surfaced of her in 2009 praising “Jonathan Gruber of MIT’s analysis of what the comparison is to the status quo versus what will happen in our bill.”

      Faced with these facts, Drew Hammill, a Pelosi spokesman, told the Washington Post that “she said she doesn’t ‘know who he is,’ not that she’s never heard of him.”

      Enough. We are now being subjected to what Springer’s Blog calls “Gruberish,” which it defines as “any bewildering deluge of falsehoods designed to confound an audience based on the speaker’s awareness that the truth must be concealed by any means necessary.”

      The new Congress just elected by the American people should peel back this Gruberish. It should launch hearings into just how the Congressional Budget Office was manipulated to provide misleading cost figures for Obamacare, even as the GOP appoints a new CBO director who can bolster confidence in the office. It can pick up on an idea promoted by Representative Fred Upton of Michigan that Congress should send President Obama a simple bill of just a few lines codifying his frequently repeated pledge that “if you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period.” Democrats may have to block it through a Senate filibuster, but the exercise and accompanying debate would be illuminating.

      Finally, the media should be shamed into looking more carefully into the bona fides and honesty of the “outside experts” that are trotted out in support of dubious schemes like Obamacare. It should be embarrassing to national media outlets that the growing number of Gruber videos should have been unearthed by a Pennsylvania blogger.

      It turns out that far from being disinterested analysts, “outside experts” brought in by government are often highly compensated players whose statements easily slide into propaganda. Gruber supplemented his $400,000 payments from the Obama administration with some $2 million in contracts helping states set up health-care exchanges, much as Mike Leavitt, a former Health and Human Services secretary and adviser to Mitt Romney, did on the Republican side. But as Byron York of theWashington Examiner notes, Jonathan Gruber is a special case worthy of special attention: “He is, by his own account, a man who intentionally deceived the public in order to pass a measure from which he stood to profit handsomely.”

      That’s why liberals are scrambling to disassociate themselves from Gruber while at the same time denying the realities of Obamacare’s failures. And that’s precisely why the cover-up of Jonathan Gruber’s remarks — by President Obama, Representative Pelosi, and others — can’t be allowed to stand and must be exposed.
     
    #26     Nov 18, 2014
  7. If Bob McConnell and Rick Perry can be prosecuted for serious felonies, I fail to see how this Gruber should not be. He was basically paid $400k by Obama to go out and lie about obamacare. It's not like we would have to prove it. He's already admitted it. He should be before a Senate committee getting grilled by the end of January. "What did the President know and when did he know it?"
     
    #27     Nov 19, 2014
  8. dbphoenix

    dbphoenix

    If being paid to go out and lie about something were a felony, all of Madison Avenue would be behind bars.
     
    #28     Nov 19, 2014
    gwb-trading likes this.
  9. jem

    jem

    if he lied to Congress under oath... they should.
    this was not a criminal protecting his own skin.

    this was a criminal conspiracy to gain control of 20 percent of the economy.
     
    #29     Nov 19, 2014
  10. Certainly prividing knowingly false testimony to congress is a felony. so is taking money from the government under false pretences. It is not a defense for gruber to say he was told to make a political case. His client was not obama, it was the American people. Prosecutors frequently bring these "theft of honest services" cases. Gruber was basically bribed to mislead congress. The fact that it was the president doing the bribing does not make it legal.
     
    #30     Nov 19, 2014