Tag Archives: Jonathan Gruber

Bias?

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Sometimes bias in the media is not illustrated by how a story is reported but rather if a story is reported. Real Clear Politics posted an article yesterday illustrating this fact.

The article tells the story of the spiking of an important story:

That is exactly what the national media have done to an important story about the White House’s intimate working relationship with MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, who helped craft the Affordable Care Act. You may remember Gruber from his infamous videotapes, the ones in which he called the American public too stupid to understand the law. He added their stupidity was helpful to Obama, Pelosi, and Reid in passing the law.

…They vaguely remembered somebody named Gruber or Goober or something but, fortunately, he played only a marginal role in health care. Thanks for asking. Next question?

Now, this may surprise you, but it turns out the White House knew Gruber very well and knew he played a crucial role in the health care bill. The White House simply decided to lie about it. Perhaps they agree with Gruber’s judgment about your intelligence.

How do we know about Gruber’s role? Not because the White House released any documents, not because the media dug into it, but because the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz, got MIT to turn over the relevant emails. There were 20,000 pages of emails back-and-forth between Gruber and the White House in the crucial months when the bill was being crafted and passed.

Amazing. The Wall Street Journal reported the story. I believe Fox News also reported it. Otherwise the major media has been totally silent on the issue. As far as the average American voter is concerned, President Obama and his cronies were perfectly honest in their descriptions of the role MIT professor Jonathan Gruber played in the development and selling of ObamaCare.

The article also points out what happened with the role of Jonathan Gruber was mentioned on a morning news show:

What happened on Morning Joe was fascinating. One of the hosts, Mika Brzezinski, called attention to the Journal story. Her co-host, former GOP Rep. Joe Scarborough, followed up. Turning to Mark Halperin, who is the co-managing editor of Bloomberg Politics and a former senior reporter at Time, Scarborough asked if the story was inconsistent with White House statements. “I owe my Republican sources an apology,” Halperin said, “because they kept telling me he [Gruber] was hugely involved, and the White House played it down.”

Then Scarborough asked the money question: “Did the White House lie about that?”

“I think they were not fully forthcoming.”

That answer did not come from a White House official or a Democratic operative. It came from a big-time reporter. And not just any reporter. It came from a reporter to whom the White House had deliberately lied in background briefings. Does he call them out? Nope. He spins for them.

If a voter is depending on the major media for his news, he will, because of this sort of bias, be a low-information voter. We have reached a point where a voter who reads The New York Times, at one time one of the most respected newspapers in the nation, will be a low-information voter. That is truly sad.

Sometimes Irony Is Just Fun

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This week we heard stories about the faculty of Harvard University being upset that the ObamaCare Health Insurance that they supported affected them in a negative way. Yesterday The Chicago Tribune weighed in on the subject. The article reminds us that MIT economist Jonathan Gruber boasted that one of the reasons ObamaCare was passed was that the American voters were stupid (uninformed would have been a kinder word, but he said stupid).

The article illustrates that even smart Americans got caught in the ObamaCare trap:

Turns out, however, that some smart people at Gruber’s alma mater, Harvard, also are flummoxed by the health care overhaul that many of their fellow Harvard brainiacs championed into law. They believed the whopper from President Obama, Gruber et al. that Obamacare would spend billions to cover millions and tame health care costs. And, oh yes, if you liked your coverage, you could keep your coverage.

…Harvard profs are learning, extremely belatedly, what smart people knew from Day One: Obamacare is disruptive and expensive. All of that free care is not free. Someone has to pay. Make that: Everyone has to pay. No exceptions for Harvard professors.

There is a lesson here all Americans need to learn–there is no free money. The government has no money of its own. All the money the government has it has taken from either individuals or businesses. Actually, there are really no taxes on businesses or corporations–taxes put on businesses or corporations become business expenses and are passed along to the consumer in the form of  higher prices. There is no free lunch. Most Americans who have to keep to a household budget have figured that out; evidently Harvard professors have a different learning curve.

The article has a suggestion for the Harvard professors:

A modest proposal: Harvard profs helped lead the charge to ram Obamacare into law. They should now lend their fierce intellectual firepower to a Republican-led effort in Congress to roll back some of the law’s most pernicious and costly effects.

The article has a few suggestions as to things that could be done to fix ObamaCare and change it into a reasonable law. Personally, I would like to see ObamaCare replaced with health insurance that includes three things; tort reform, portability of health insurance across state lines, and insurance that stays with the persont regardless of job changes. We need to get the government out of the insurance business and let the people who understand actuary tables run their business,. Health insurance companies have one of the lowest profit margins of all American businesses. They are not the money-grubbing control freaks Congress and the Obama Administration have accused them of being. Actually, if ObamaCare is indicative of anything, it illustrates that the money-grubbing control freaks seem to be located in government–not in the insurance business.

Who Can We Trust?

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Even Snopes doesn’t get it right all the time.

Yesterday the Washington Examiner posted a story about a recent entry on the Snopes site. Snopes is a site that many people use for fact-checking. The entry had to do with comments made by health economist Jonathan Gruber last year (see rightwinggranny.com). The comments are recorded on video and evidently later taken off of the internet (although they are still in the rightwinggranny article).

The article at the Washington Examiner tells the story:

Rather than giving the claim what is easily a “true” rating, the fact checking group gives it a “mixture” rating.

“It appears the comments made by Gruber entered the stream of social media hot topics due to a 9 November 2014 post on the website the Daily Signal, where it was framed as a ‘newly surfaced video,’ ” the website reported. “The shorter version of the video was initially posted by the political action committee (PAC) American Commitment.”

American Commitment, which is not a PAC, had also linked to the original video from UPenn from its own YouTube channel.

…Snopes fact-checkers seem unable to draw obvious conclusions about something as simple as reading a time stamp on YouTube.

“While the newly-circulated video of Gruber’s remarks is unedited, the comments are neither recent nor complete, and whether the originating source attempted to pull them from the Internet at one point remains unclear,” the conclusion reads.

Snopes is owned by Barbara and David Mikkelson of California. I have no idea what their political persuasion is, but in the case of Jonathan Gruber they seem to have missed the boat. This incident is another reason every person needs to do their own research on the issues they care about.