Says Jonathan Gruber was “some adviser who never worked on our staff.”
— Barack Obama on Nov. 16 in Brisbane, Australia, for the G20 summit
Even overseas, President Barack Obama couldn’t escape questions about the health care law.
Footage emerged last week of MIT economist Jonathan Gruber claiming more than a year ago that the “stupidity of the American voter” and a “lack of transparency” were key to passing the Affordable Care Act. Gruber played a role in helping to write and pass the health care law.
Obama downplayed Gruber’s involvement while speaking at the G20 summit in Australia.
“The fact that some adviser who never worked on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with in terms of the voters is no reflection on the actual process that was run,” Obama said of Gruber’s comments.
PolitiFact wondered what role Gruber had in crafting the Affordable Care Act and whether Obama accurately recounted his involvement.
Gruber was instrumental in helping Massachusetts build its health care overhaul from 2003 to 2006, sometimes called “Romneycare” after former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, which is widely viewed as the model for the federal law.
In 2012, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum claimed a Romney adviser, who turned out to be Gruber, admitted that the Massachusetts law was the model for the federal law. We rated Santorum’s claim as Mostly True. We’ve interviewed Gruber from time to time as an expert on both laws.
A month after Obama took office in 2009, the Department of Health and Human Services contracted Gruber to provide “technical assistance in evaluating options for national health care reform,” according to a federal job posting.
Gruber was the only person considered for the position because he developed a “proprietary statistically sophisticated micro-simulation model that has the flexibility to ascertain the distribution of changes in health care spending and public and private health sector costs.”
Essentially, Gruber had built a way to accurately estimate health care costs and spending for varying health insurance proposals, federal programs and tax policies, and it made him “uniquely positioned to provide the analytic work.”
Gruber’s model, called the Gruber Microsimulation Model, was able to predict important factors, such as how much insurance would cost for individuals to buy in each state.
Gruber declined to comment for this story. But others who worked on the legislation have rebutted claims that Gruber was “an architect” of the Affordable Care Act.
John McDonough, a Harvard health policy professor who was a senior adviser to the Senate Health and Education Committee when the law was written, told PolitiFact that Gruber’s involvement was important, but it did not involve the actual writing of the bill.
Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress who served as a senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services from 2009-10, wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that Gruber “did not make policy, nor did he work for the White House, HHS, or any congressional committee.”
“The true architects of the ACA are the members of the Senate Finance and Senate Health committees who wrote the bill,” she wrote.
Gruber may not be an architect of the bill, but referring to him as “some adviser” is misleading as well.
Such a flippant characterization also dismisses Gruber’s influence on Obama’s positions on health care in the lead-up to his presidential bid and during his first year in office.
A video clip that resurfaced last week showed then-Sen. Obama speaking at a Brookings Institution event in 2006 (Gruber spoke later in the event). During his remarks, Obama said about the forthcoming Hamilton Project, “You have already drawn some of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles, many of them I have stolen ideas from liberally, people ranging from Robert Gordon to Austan Goolsbee; Jon Gruber; my dear friend, Jim Wallis here, who can inform what are sometimes dry policy debates with a prophetic voice.”
Gruber visited the White House a dozen times in 2009 and 2010, according to visitor logs.
Gruber also had meetings with many of the heavyweights on Obama’s economic and health care staff.
Gruber was an adviser. But he was not just “some adviser,” an especially flip characterization. Gruber was considered “uniquely positioned” for a contract job assisting with Obama’s health care efforts. He was a very important adviser.
Gruber was paid quite handsomely by the federal government. His economic simulation model was very important to those writing the bill. He also met with Obama in the White House and had a dozen meetings that often included some of the most senior members of Obama’s economic and health care teams.
Obama’s statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.
We rate it Mostly False.
About the Author
