Tuesday was a difficult day on Capitol Hill for the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction — the simple idea in logic that the same thing cannot be both true and untrue at the same time.
The occasion of this philosophical crisis was testimony to the House Oversight Committee by Obamacare architect and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. Gruber, who was deeply involved in developing the Affordable Care Act, is now best known for praising its lack of transparency as “a political asset” and cheerfully attributing the law’s passage to “the stupidity of the American voter.”
But his problems in Tuesday’s hearing went far beyond unpopular opinions or bad word choices. Gruber also had to explain away very explicit and substantive, videotaped comments he had made about the healthcare law in academic forums.
He found even basic facts difficult to acknowledge. For four painful minutes of questioning, he refused to tell the committee how much money he had been paid for his work on Obamacare (it’s $6 million). He denied being an “architect” of the healthcare law — that is, someone who helped design it — which contradicts both journalistic reporting and his own public comments. (One example: In a January 2012 appearance, Gruber responded to one man’s question about Obamacare by stating, “That’s the exactly the kind of wonky detail that we spent a lot of time [on] in writing this law.”)
Gruber was pressed to explain away his explanation of how he, an economist and former member of the advisory board for the Congressional Budget Office, arranged that Obamacare would game the CBO scoring process to hide its tax increases. On tape, he found this easy: “If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies,” he had said. “So it’s written to do that.” He had also said that the bill was drafted in a “tortured” manner in order to get favorable CBO treatment.
In his testimony Tuesday, Gruber tried to dismiss his own earlier statements as having been “made in a tone of [political] expertise that I don’t have.” But Gruber had previously told the New York Times, “I know more about this law than any other economist.” If he knew more than anyone about the law, and he knew how and why he had to game the CBO scoring, this new explanation doesn’t wash.
Gruber had also made comments relevant to a Supreme Court case that will decide whether Obamacare allows subsidies for insurance customers in states that did not set up their own exchanges. Gruber had suggested many times that it does not.
But he claimed on Tuesday that he had only been speaking conditionally, in the event that the federal government failed to set up healthcare.gov. The thing is, no one who has heard his comments could possibly accept this explanation. For example, in a Jan. 10, 2012 lecture, Gruber criticized state governments that had not yet set up exchanges, and mused about consequences “when the voters in states see that by not setting up an exchange the politicians in their state are costing state residents hundreds of millions and billions of dollars.” He then added, “That is really the ultimate threat — will people understand that, gee, if your governor doesn’t set up an exchange, you’re losing hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits to be delivered to your citizens.”
In all of these cases and others, Gruber’s own words in the last few years are strong evidence that he knows how to tell the truth and indeed, in unguarded moments, does so naturally and forcefully. It’s too bad he forgot how to do that the moment he was sworn in by a congressional committee.
