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Which could help win King v. Burwell for opponents of the law

Newly uncovered e-mails prove Jonathan Gruber key to ObamaCare design



If you've forgotten why it mattered that Jonathan Gruber was one of the key architects of ObamaCare - and why the White House tried so hard to pretend they had no idea who he was - let's just bring it back to the top of everyone's mind. Gruber said a lot of things about the American people being stupid, and about Democrats' exploiting that perceived stupidity in the course of hiding the law's true costs. All of that was politically problematic for the White House, but here's the statement that was (and might still be) legally problematic for the law's survival:
That is exactly what the plaintiffs are arguing in King v. Burwell, which should be decided by the Supreme Court any day now. ObamaCare was intentionally written to ensure that only people who bought their policies on state-run exchanges could get subsidies, and the reason they did that was to put pressure on the states to set up their own exchanges. When it didn't work, as 34 states refused to do so, the administration ignored the wording in its own law and went ahead subsidizing policies bought on the federal exchange after all. This is the basis for the case - that the administration can't just ignore the clear wording in its own law - and one of the most important pieces of proof that the law does in fact mean what the plaintiffs say is the statement of Jonathan Gruber above. The response from the White House? Jonathan Gruber? Who's that? We don't know him! Nice try, but Avik Roy of Forbes reports on e-mails unconvered by MIT that decisively prove otherwise:

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Gruber was no independent expert. The Obama administration paid him nearly $400,000 as a consultant on Obamacare’s design, especially its new layer of federal health insurance regulation. But Gruber tried to avoid disclosing this conflict in his public commentary and appearances. Democratic officials did as well, in order to maintain the pose that Gruber’s opinions were non-partisan. Indeed, when Sen. Mike Enzi (R., Wyo.) specifically asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for a list of all its paid consultants, Gruber’s name was mysteriously omitted. The emails obtained from MIT show that on January 8, 2010, Gruber emailed Jeanne Lambrew—the White House’s most important internal employee on Obamacare issues—for advice on how to handle an inquiry from Politico about his lucrative contract. Gruber kept Lambrew and her colleagues apprised of his discussions with Ezra Klein, and Lambrew praised Gruber for “being an integral part” of Obamacare’s development.
Part of the deception stems from the fact that the White House wanted Gruber to pass himself off as an "independent expert" during media appearances, when in fact he had a huge contract from the administration and was one of the key architects of the law. When Gruber gave an interview to the gullible Ezra Klein, then blogging for the Washington Post, Klein lapped up Gruber's claims about how ObamaCare would affect non-group insurance rates, and never revealed (if he even knew) that Gruber was working for the administration the whole time. And now, of course, they're desperate to deny Gruber's connection to the design of ObamaCare because if they admit it, then they admit he knew what he was talking about in the video above - and that undermines their argument before the Supremes in King v. Burwell. This whole thing has been built on deception from the beginning, so none of this should surprise anyone. But you're not going to hear about it in the mainstream media so you'll have to spread the word yourself.


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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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