Obamacare “architect” Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, frequently contacted the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services on the healthcare law and how to publicly describe his role, a 20,000-page trove of Gruber’s emails released to the Wall Street Journal show.
In videos that surfaced this past year, in 2013 Gruber referred to the “stupidity of the American voter” and the “huge political advantage” the healthcare legislation’s lack of transparency would provide in getting the bill passed.
The ensuing public furor against Gruber for his comments caused the Obama administration to distance themselves from the former adviser. “The fact that some adviser who never worked on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with … is no reflection on the actual process that was run,” Obama said of Gruber’s role at the G20 summit in Australia in November 2014.
But the 20,000 pages of emails provided by the House Oversight Committee to The Wall Street Journal paint a different picture.
The emails show Gruber kept HHS abreast of his conversations with health reporters and lawmakers: He let them know when a conversation went well and a story would post; when he got pushback about his undisclosed contract he revealed only their description of his activities; and that he worked to convince Sen. Mary Landrieu to support the bill.
“There’s no doubt [Gruber] was a much more integral part of this than they’ve said,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah), chairman of the committee that released the emails, reported the Wall Street Journal. “He put up this facade he was an arm’s length away. It was a farce.”
Gruber received almost $400,000 from HHS alone for his work creating computer models that would predict how the Congressional Budget Office would score the healthcare legislation, according to public records.
From the Wall Street Journal:
The emails show Mr. Gruber was in touch with key advisers such as Peter Orszag, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget, an arm of the White House that oversaw federal programs.
He was also in contact with Joshua Furman, an economic adviser to the president, and Ezekiel Emanuel, who was then a special adviser for health policy at OMB.
One email indicates Mr. Gruber was invited to meet with Mr. Obama. In a July 2009 email, he wrote that Mr. Orszag had “invited me to meet with the head honcho to talk about cost control.”
“Thank you for being an integral part of getting us to this historic moment,” according to Sept. 9, 2009 email to Mr. Gruber from Jeanne Lambrew, a top Obama administration health adviser who worked at HHS and the White House. In a November 2009 email, she called Mr. Gruber “our hero.”
Gruber’s emails strike the same tone his 2013 videos do; he speaks of “winners and losers” if employees are moved into the exchanges as a result of the Affordable Care Act. In fact, in “an August 2009 email, he said 4.2 million people with employer-sponsored insurance would be dropped from having coverage — a trend that hasn’t materialized,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
The emails the Wall Street Journal scoured were obtained from MIT and cover the period between January 2009 and March 2010.
When Gruber was called before Congress to explain his remarks and his role in the health care law this past year, Gruber claimed he was not really an architect and that he wasn’t “an expert on politics and my tone implied that I was.”
Both Gruber and HHS declined comment to the Wall Street Journal.
