Baldo

Nov 15 2014, 09:48 AM

AP: Keeping your health law plan may mean premium hike

...Overall, the premiums for a type of low-price plan that the government uses to set subsidies for consumers will cost roughly the same as this year, about $330 a month on average. Many people will pay much less after subsidies, about 25 percent of the cost, which will be good news for first-time customers.

But there is a catch if you are already a customer: Your plan may no longer be the lost-cost benchmark in your community. In that case, you'll pay more unless you switch.

"Just because you enrolled in a low-cost plan this year is no guarantee that your plan will also be low-cost next year," said Larry Levitt of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. He analyzed a 48-city sample of 2015 premiums from data available earlier this week.

"Last year's low cost plans will experience premium increases, meaning the majority of consumers will experience cost increases if they re-enroll in the same plan," said Caroline Pearson of Avalere Health, a private market analysis firm......

kbp

Nov 15 2014, 11:01 AM

there has to be a financial reason for such.

Baldo

Nov 15 2014, 10:23 AM

The hits keep coming: Gruber celebrates ‘mislabeling’ Obamacare in video #6
The hits just keep on rolling in. After the previously unknown investment advisor Rich Weinstein established that there was a literal trove of videos featuring Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber speaking candidly and in strikingly impolitic ways about the health care reform law and the American public he helped deceive, the mainstream press is now getting in on the act.

The sixth installment in the series of videos featuring Gruber crucifying himself was uncovered by CNN’s Jake Tapper:...snipped

http://linkis.com/hotair.com/archives/KoTI0

Quote:

 

The sixth installment in the series of videos featuring Gruber crucifying himself was uncovered by CNN’s Jake Tapper:

• 
  
• The issue at hand in this sixth video is known as the “Cadillac tax,” which was represented as a tax on employers’ expensive health insurance plans. While employers do not currently have to pay taxes on health insurance plans they provide employees, starting in 2018, companies that provide health insurance that costs more than $10,200 for an individual or $27,500 for a family will have to pay a 40 percent tax.

Much like the videos uncovered by Weinstein, Tapper discovered the sixth video also hiding in plain sight posted on the Pioneer Institute’s public policy research website. The relevant remarks begin at the 30:38 mark:
(see video at link)

In those 2011 remarks, Gruber said that, despite the fact that most members of his profession agree employer-based health insurance tax breaks were bad policy, “it turns out politically it’s really hard to get rid of.”
[As Rich Lowry points further down, the elite leftists always want to tax everything, including your healthcare and medical costs. The reason they look like such ironic azzhats here is because their sole reason given to control you more is by convincing the public they were born with some inalienable right to healthcare paid for by others if necessary.... you have a right, so long as you pay the tax for it!]

He said that the Affordable Care Act helped to do away with this system in two ways. The first, “by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people when we all know it’s a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.” And secondly, by delaying the implementation of this tax until 2018. “But by starting it late, we were able to tie the cap for Cadillac Tax to CPI, not medical inflation,” Gruber said.

“This was the only political way we were ever going to take on what is one of the worst public policies in America, and every economist should celebrate this,” Gruber insisted.

“It’s on the books now,” Gruber added of the 2018 implementation deadline at which point he anticipated employers and unions would seek to have this tax repealed. “At that point, if they want to get rid of it they’re going to have to fill a trillion dollar hole in the deficit.”

Tapper concluded by noting why Gruber’s latest remarks expose even more duplicity on the part of the White House in their effort to pass Obamacare:

• 
  
• When the Cadillac tax was first rolled out, it was explained by Obamacare backers as a tax that would only impact those with “high end plans” — not all employer sponsored plans. A White House economic adviser in 2009 set “the record straight” by saying “the excise tax levied on insurance companies for high-premium plans, the so-called ‘Cadillac tax,’ will affect only a small portion of the very highest cost health plans — a total of 3% of premiums in 2013.”

As a closing thought, you will not regret reading National Review’s Rich Lowry who today thanked Gruber for not disguising the abject contempt with which the technocratic left holds the public they are purportedly serving.

“He has done us all a favor by affording us an unvarnished look into the progressive mind, which values complexity over simplicity, favors indirect taxes and impositions on the American public so their costs can be hidden, and has a dim view of the average American,” Lowry wrote. “An assumption that Americans are incompetent is woven into the Left’s worldview. It is reluctant to entrust individuals with free choice for fear they will exercise it poorly and irresponsibly.”

In displaying such naked disdain for the public, Gruber has performed his very best, and likely last, service to the American people.

Baldo

Nov 15 2014, 11:09 AM

kbp

Nov 15 2014, 11:01 AM

there has to be a financial reason for such.

You can pretty much file it under screw the taxpayers who pay for it and get more votes for those that don't = more voters for us = more power for us = the ability to blow more money on our crony capitalists & special interest groups & take a nice sized portion for ourselves.

Somewhere in there is the answer

Baldo

Nov 15 2014, 10:45 AM

Who Lied? Jonathan Gruber Linked to Getting Obamacare to Illegal Aliens

snip

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/jeffrey-lord/2014/11/14/who-lied-jonathan-gruber-linked-getting-obamacare-illegal-aliens

Quote:

 

Says Mr. Gruber:

• 
  
• “I worked with the transition team to help put the numbers together for the administration. And then, essentially, most of 2009 I was really on loan from the administration to Congress, particularly the Senate Finance Committee, to help them put the numbers together on what became the finance committee bill, which really became Obamacare. Yeah, that's what I did.”

kbp

Nov 15 2014, 12:03 PM

Baldo

Nov 15 2014, 10:45 AM

Who Lied? Jonathan Gruber Linked to Getting Obamacare to Illegal Aliens

snip

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/jeffrey-lord/2014/11/14/who-lied-jonathan-gruber-linked-getting-obamacare-illegal-aliens

Quote:

 

Says Mr. Gruber:

• 
  
• “I worked with the transition team to help put the numbers together for the administration. And then, essentially, most of 2009 I was really on loan from the administration to Congress, particularly the Senate Finance Committee, to help them put the numbers together on what became the finance committee bill, which really became Obamacare. Yeah, that's what I did.”

...and the HELP bill. It strikes me odd that the courts have not given more attention to the INTENT behind the two bills used to construct Obamacare.

This is a must read. I'm not sure if that can happen.

If it does, it strengthens the argument to NOT provide any form of amnesty...the cost to taxpayers will have us renaming the ACA to IAC; IllegalAlienCare.
.

Quote:

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2835384/Obamacare-architect-Jonathan-Gruber-billed-federal-state-governments-5-9-million-advice-videos-surface-showing-undercutting-landmark-law.html

$5.9 million for advice, as more videos surface showing him undercutting the landmark law

• 
  
• MIT economist got $392,600 from the Dept of Health and Human Services for his Obamacare consulting
  
• National Institutes of Health paid him $2 million for Medicare consulting
  
• Justice Department has added $1.7 million for expert witness testimony
  
• Four US states combined to pay him another $1.6 million for advice about health care laws, and contracts for four more states were unavailable
  
• If those states followed suit, Gruber's haul would exceed $7.5 million
  
• Gruber has become a thorn in Democrats' sides since videos emerged of him candidly discussing how the Obama White House misled Americans to pass the Obamacare law

By David Martosko, US Political Editor for MailOnline

Four U.S. states and the federal government have padded Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber's wallet to the tune of $5.9 million since 2000, including millions connected to his work on the Affordable Care Act.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist has been pilloried for collecting $392,600 from the Obama administration's Health and Human Services Department while the law was being written, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Gruber's consulting contracts give states and the feds access to a proprietary formula that can determine how changes in a health care system's structure will affect costs.

The 'Gruber Microsimulation Model' is what he sold to the White House. It helped Obama's team anticipate what the influential Congressional Budget Office (CBO) would say about various features of the final plan – and whether their costs would officially be considered 'taxes.'

Gruber found himself in hot water this week when an old video surfaced in which he explains how the Obama administration wriggled out of legislative trouble by hiding 'Cadillac taxes' on expensive medical insurance policies – by shifting the costs to insurers and trusting them to pass the financial burden on to their customers.

'The stupidity of the American voter' let him get away with it, he said in one videotaped speech at the University of Pennsylvania.

Gruber explained that the Obamacare law 'was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO did not score the [individual insurance] mandate as taxes.'

'If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.'

The Washingon Post reported Friday that the National Institutes of Health put about $2.05 million in Gruber's pocket since 2008 for consulting work related to Medicare Part D prescription drug plans.

The Justice Department has added $1.7 million more – mostly for 'expert witness' testimony – since 2000.

And the State Department paid Gruber $103,500 in 2008 and 2009 for what the government vaguely calls legal services, according to an analysis by The Daily Caller.

Of the eight U.S. states that have contracted with Gruber to get access to his computer model – Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wisconsin – four of them have published contracts worth about $400,000 each.

If the other four followed suit, that would amount to another $1.6 million. Some of those fees were shared with other researchers who co-authored his reports.

All eight used his services to help estimate insurance marketplace costs related to their state-based Obamacare programs.

Gruber also worked extensively on the so-called 'Romneycare' law, a Massachusetts health insurance plan that formed the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of Obamacare, and reportedly won a consulting contract with the state of California.

The Vermont model he built along with Harvard School of Public Health economist William Hsiao is an attempt to construct a 'single-payer' insurance system that puts government in charge of health care costs for everyone in the state.

The sixth in a long line of embarrassing videos emerged Friday, showing the two academics testifying before lawmakers there.

One legislator quoted a newspaper op-ed warning that 'any Hsiao-Gruber-type health care mega-system will inevitably lead to coercive mandates, ballooning costs, increasing taxes, bureaucratic outrages, shabby facilities, disgruntled providers, long waiting lines, lower-quality care, special-interest nest-feathering, and destructive wage and price controls.'

In the video, brought to light by Watchdog.org, Gruber is seen responding: 'Was this written by my adolescent children by any chance?'

The room erupted in laughter, but the comment had actually come from the pen of two-term Vermont state senator John McClaughry, by then serving as vice president of the conservative Ethan Allen Institute.

A St. Louis, Missouri blogger unearthed records on Friday showing that Gruber met with President Obama at the White House on July 20, 2009.

That backed up a PBS Frontline interview he gave in 2012, in which he positioned himslelf as a major player in the Obamacare law's evolution.

He saw Obama, he said, in 'summer 2009.'

'The big issue there is that he really wants to make sure I’m moving forward on cost control. I think that at this point he sort of knew we had a good plan on coverage, but he was worried on cost control.'

'So we had a meeting in the Oval Office with several experts, including myself,' Gruber continued, 'on what can we do to get credible savings on cost control that the Congressional Budget Office would recognize and score as savings in this law.'

Quote:

 

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/11/14/despite-dem-claims-trash-talking-gruber-was-well-paid-adviser-for-obamacare-and/

Despite Dem claims, trash-talking Gruber was well-paid adviser for ObamaCare and more

[...]

Defenders of ObamaCare say the tenets of the law have been transparent from the get-go. If anything, they are blaming Gruber for getting it wrong. Brian Beutler of The New Republic wrote, “His suggestion that the key cost-sharing tradeoffs weren’t widely discussed just isn’t true.”

Jerold Duquette, political science professor at Central Connecticut State University, argued on his blog that "all legislation is framed for maximum political acceptability and minimum pushback" and "includes spin intended to short circuit opposition spin." He wrote: "The incredibly phony outrage of conservative pols and pundits is pitiful."

Gruber, who did not respond to a request for comment for this story, expressed regret for his comments on Tuesday on MSNBC. “I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately, and I regret making those comments.”

Several more videos have emerged this week since the “stupidity” clip. They included speeches where he talked about how the so-called Cadillac tax on high-end health plans was envisioned to charge insurance companies rather than consumers, all the while knowing the enrollees would get hit with higher prices anyway as a result.

In one clip, he said of the Cadillac tax: “They proposed it and that passed because the American people are too stupid to understand the difference.”

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest disagreed with Gruber, telling reporters on Thursday, “The fact of the matter is, the process associated with the writing and passing and implementing of the Affordable Care Act has been extraordinarily transparent.”

[...]

Quote:

 

http://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/grassley-seeks-greater-transparency-senate-committee-testimony

Grassley seeks greater transparency from Senate committee testimony

Sep 30, 2010

[...]

Floor Statement of Senator Chuck Grassley Introduction of the Witness Sunshine Resolution Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Mr. President, so far during the 111th Congress, the Finance Committee, on which I serve as the ranking Republican member, has held over 50 hearings. At those hearings, around 200 witnesses offered their testimony and answered members’ questions. The witnesses who testify at our hearings are considered to be some of the most qualified experts in their field and their participation is critical to the legislative process. Because of their influence on legislation, it is important that Congress knows to what extent the witness’ testimony is objective and if the witness has any significant interest in the outcome of potential legislation.

Three of the hearings held by the Finance Committee this Congress were roundtable discussions on health care reform. These discussions brought 41 witnesses, including industry stakeholders and academic leaders, before the Committee to share their expert knowledge on policy options for health reform.

At one of these roundtables, Dr. Jonathan Gruber, a health care economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testified before the committee on health care reform. I thought he was an unbiased expert, but was later disappointed to hear that he had been paid over $400,000 by the Administration to help advance the president’s health care proposals. At the very least, he should have been straightforward with the Committee and disclosed this financial interest.

In addition to his testimony before the Finance Committee, Dr. Gruber testified in front of the HELP Committee and was also a high-profile supporter of the Administration’s health care reform effort in the media. In only a handful of his many articles on health care reform did he disclose his financial conflict of interest.

While the propriety of Dr. Gruber advocating for Administration positions in the media and other venues while failing to disclose his financial ties to the Administration has been called into question, I am especially concerned about his advocacy before the United States Congress. When an academic leader comes before Congress to advocate a position, Congress should have confidence that the witness is both independent and objective and not being paid to assist the Administration, or any other organization, in its efforts.

Equally troubling is the Department of Health and Human Services, which has been unresponsive to efforts by Senator Enzi and me to learn more about their practice of hiring consultants to advance the President’s agenda.

The fact that this expert was paid by the Administration – and hid that fact from Congress - really taints everything this particular advocate told the committees. If Congress had been aware of his arrangement with HHS prior to his testimony, we would have had the opportunity to clarify that relationship with Dr. Gruber before considering his opinions and ideas. Unfortunately, when we learn about it after the fact, it completely discredits the information he presented.

To follow up on this alarming news, Senator Enzi and I sent a letter to Dr. Gruber on January 26, 2010, asking him for details of any other government contracts he might have or might have had over the last five years and for details on whether he disclosed his government ties during media interviews, speaking engagements and written works on health care reform.

Dr. Gruber's response failed to answer any of the questions posed in the letter. Instead, the response barely exceeded one page in length, was dismissive of any concern about the lack of disclosure and attempted to excuse his failure to disclose and to explain away the need for any detailed response. Furthermore, Dr. Gruber did not even commit to providing any such disclosure of the financial relationship with the Administration in the future.

Unfortunately, Dr. Gruber's failure to answer our questions came as no surprise. In my 30 years serving in the United States Congress, I have found that chasing answers on the back end is much more difficult than requiring clarity and transparency from the start. And many of my colleagues might be surprised to find out that although many witnesses voluntarily disclose their affiliations or relationships so that they can explain them, no Senate committee currently requires witnesses to disclose potential conflicts of interest.

Dr. Gruber even highlighted this point when he said in his February 23 letter that, “to the best of my recollection, during the course of my health care reform work with Congress, no Member or staffer ever asked me whether I held any government contracts.”

In retrospect, if we were to have asked Dr. Gruber to disclose his agreements with the Administration up front, we would have had the ability to ask him questions in-person, and he would have been given a chance to explain the relationship before testifying, so that his testimony could be given its proper weight. Our failure as an institution to ask for transparency in testimony is a problem that has a simple solution, a solution that most other institutions that rely on the work of academic experts have already implemented. The solution is to simply ask witnesses who come before the Senate to disclose any potential conflicts of interest up front.

Our colleagues in the House of Representatives are already requiring witnesses to do this and there is no reason why we shouldn’t require the same level of transparency from witnesses who come before the Senate.

That is why today I am introducing the Witness Sunshine Resolution. This resolution will make the Senate committee hearings more transparent and thus more credible and valuable to the legislative process. It achieves this goal by requiring each witness that appears before any Senate committee to submit a form disclosing outside affiliations and financial interests in any organizations, including government entities, which are directly related to the topic of the committee hearing.

In August, I was happy to learn that the Administration is supportive of this idea. In an August 4 letter, Secretary Sebelius wrote me saying, “Should the Senate Finance Committee or any other Congressional Committee choose to [require witnesses to submit financial disclosure forms in advance of an appearance before the Committee], I would certainly encourage HHS contractors to fully comply with [that requirement].”

So adopting this rule should be an easy decision for the Senate. Our colleagues in the House of Representatives have been requiring this level of transparency for over a decade and now we know that the Administration supports the idea as well. The House tells me that their witnesses are not overburdened or discouraged to offer testimony because of this requirement. I have carefully drafted this resolution so that the requirement for transparency similarly does not burden Senate witnesses.

It is time for this body to meet the standards for transparency set by the House and followed in so many other institutions across the country. Supporting my resolution will help ensure that future testimony can be given its proper weight, and end the uncertainty of unknown interests influencing testimony. I urge my colleagues to support my resolution.

• 
  
• SMLBound @SMLBound
  Obama: "I did not have Health Care relations with that man, Jonathan Gruber"...

kbp

Nov 16 2014, 11:21 AM

http://twitchy.com/2014/11/16/well-briefed-obama-tells-ed-henry-i-just-heard-about-gruber-video/

'Well briefed’ Obama tells Ed Henry ‘I just heard about’ Gruber [video]

• 
  
• SMLBound @SMLBound
  Obama: "I did not have Health Care relations with that man, Jonathan Gruber"...

In Brisbane Australia, President Obama clumsily told Fox News’ Ed Henry that he ‘just heard about’ the controversy over Jonathan Gruber whom he described as ‘some adviser who never worked on our staff.’ He then went on to say that there was ‘not a provision of the healthcare law that was not extensively debated and it was fully transparent.’

As if that weren’t sufficiently ludicrous, the President went on to give a sales pitch for Obamacare enrollment and how successful the program is.

[...]