The hits just keep coming.
Citizen Journalists have now found 4 damning videos of MIT Economist Jonathan Gruber laughing at the American people over the planned deception of Obamacare.
Yesterday’s story of Gruber meeting with Obama in the Oval Office to plan the Cadillac Tax lie was found on the PBS website. In that interview, MIT Economist Jonathan Gruber gleefully recounts the July 20th meeting where they discussed how to get around the CBO scoring of Obamacare.
“So we had a meeting in the Oval Office with several experts, including myself, 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.“
Who else was in that meeting with Gruber and Obama?
According to ABC, everyone.
” In addition to the president and Elmendorf, present in the meeting were White House officials such as Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs Phil Schiliro, Director of the White House Office of Health Reform Nancy-Ann DeParle, Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag (a former CBO director himself), National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Christy Romer, senior adviser David Axelrod, and press secretary Robert Gibbs.
Others were there as well, including Department of Health and Human Services adviser Meena Seshamani, Harvard University economist David Cutler and Alice Rivlin of the Brookings Institute, who was founding director of CBO from 1975-1983.”
Gruber was not mentioned by name in the ABC piece, but the White House logs show us that Jonathan Gruber and David Cutler, a Harvard economist, entered the White House at the same time to meet the POTUS in the West Wing.
Cutler, Gruber, Orszag, Summers, Axelrod, Gibbs – all in the room, haranguing the CBO Director to figure out how to get a favorable report. There is no record of Douglas Elmendorf in the released White House visitor logs for this meeting. Maybe there was a hard drive crash.
When Republicans complained, former Press Secretary Robert Gibbs released a statement, saying it was a pleasant discussion that had nothing to do with the CBO.
ABC Story:
“Gibbs described the meeting as a way to discuss ways to reduce health care costs, with no discussion of the CBO methodologies that have annoyed Democrats in their drive to pass health care reform legislation.”
But what did Gruber say?
Gruber in PBS Interview:
“So we had a meeting in the Oval Office with several experts, including myself, 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.”
And what did Elmendorf say?
Douglas Elmendorf had a blog as CBO Director., The link is a dead link, but the Internet Archive saved the link. Elmendorf backs up Gruber’s story.
“I presented CBO’s assessment of the challenges of reducing federal health outlays and improving the long-term budget outlook while simultaneously expanding health insurance coverage.”
“I also described CBO’s view of the effects of the health legislation we have seen so far, as I did last Thursday in a hearing at the Senate Budget Committee and a mark-up at the House Ways and Means Committee. In addition, I discussed various policy options that could produce budgetary savings in the long run…”
Gruber’s loose lips, backed up by Elmendorf’s blog entry, directly contradict Robert Gibb’s description. The president and his advisors deliberately set about to manipulate the CBO, by their own admission. They knew they were lying, but they still sent Democrats out to lie to the American people about Obamacare’s true costs.
That cost savings lie was repeated over and over by Democrats as they moved into the August Town Halls. We saw it in Missouri with Russ Carnahan and Claire McCaskill.
How convenient for Obama that all of this information comes out in 2014, and only because citizen journalists did all the heavy lifting.
How many Senate seats were won by Democrats by sitting on this information? Or Obama’s re-election?
