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From The “It’s Only Bad When Republicans Do It” File – Grubergate

What is it with academics, politics, and honesty? First we had Climategate –  Now we have Grubergate! Grubergate? Grubergate???? What the hell is Grubergate?

Well, just like Climategate, if you get most of your news from the MSM, you’ve never heard of it because they’re not reporting it and ignoring the story. It involves MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who was paid gobs of money by the White House controlled Dept. of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to write a report on health care reform. The report was favorable. The problem is, the report is not publicly available, and, more damning, it was sold to the public as an independent analysis of the administrations health care initiatives. Here is a good jumping off point – Jane Hamsher’s article form the Huffington Post:

Up until this point, most of the attention regarding the failure to disclose the connection between Jonathan Gruber and the White House has fallen on Gruber himself. Far more troubling, however, is the lack of disclosure on the part of the White House, the Senate, the DNC and other Democratic leaders who distributed Gruber’s work and cited it as independent validation of their proposals, orchestrating the appearance of broad consensus when in fact it was all part of the same effort.

Just like Climategate, there is that term consensus…. I wonder if it features a hockey stick? Beware the Consensus Mongers!

The White House is placing a giant collective bet on Gruber’s “assumptions” to justify key portions of the Senate bill such as the “Cadillac tax,” which they allowed people to believe was independent verification. Now that we know that Gruber’s work was not that of an independent analyst but rather work performed as a contractor to the White House and paid for by taxpayers, and economists like Larry Mishel are raising serious questions about its validity, it should be made publicly available so others can judge its merits.

Hamsher shows how the White House and the press used the bought-and-paid-for report to sell the notion that Obamacare would be cost neutral:

Gruber began negotiating a sole-source contract with the Department of Health and Human Services in February of 2009, for which he was ultimately paid $392,600. The contract called for Gruber to use his statistical model for evaluating alternatives “derived from the President’s health reform proposal.” It was not a research grant, but rather a consulting contract to advise the White House Office of Health Reform, headed by Obama’s health care czar Nancy-Ann DeParle, to “develop proposals” for health care reform.

How did the feedback loop work? Well, take Gruber’s appearance before the Senate HELP Committee on November 2, 2009, for which he used his microsimulation model to make calculations about small business insurance coverage. On the same day, Gruber released an analysis of the House health care bill, which he sent to Ezra Klein of the Washington Post. Ezra published an excerpt.

White House blogger Jesse Lee then promoted both Gruber’s Senate testimony and Ezra Klein’s article on the White House blog. “We thought it would all be a little more open and transparent if we went ahead and published what our focus will be for the day” he said, pointing to Gruber’s “objective analysis.” The “transparent” part apparently stopped when everyone got to Gruber’s contractual relationship to the White House, which nobody in the three-hit triangle bothered to disclose.

But that was child’s play compared to the effort that went into selling Gruber’s analysis of the bill unveiled by the Senate on Wednesday, November 18. Two days later on Friday November 20, Gruber published a paper entitled “Impacts of the Senate High Cost Insurance Excise Tax on Wages: Updated,” claiming that the excise tax would result in wage hikes of $234 billion from 2013 through 2019.

And it was off to the races.

She then shows how the press lapped up the info and regurgitated the favorable stats featured in the report over and over again, and, like a rumor repeated ad-nauseum, a consensus was formed. She sites several instances where the White House itself mentions the report, yet doesn’t reveal the financial ties:

On the 29th Nancy-Ann DeParle, head of the very White House Office of Health Reform that Gruber was hired to consult for, posted perhaps the most misleading column of all on the White House blog:

MIT Economist Confirms Senate Health Reform Bill Reduces Costs and Improves Coverage

She identified Gruber as an “MIT Economist who has been closely following the health insurance reform process” who had “issued a compelling new report.” There was no acknowledgment that her very own White House office had commissioned Gruber’s work.

Ace Of Spades sums up the Grubergate scandal nicely:

Gruber is the MIT guy who was paid — well paid: $392,000, jack! — by the White House to run supposed analyses of the economic and other effects of the White House health care proposals.

But this paid relationship was never disclosed to the public. And to sell the White House’s proposals, they kept offering up MIT professor Gruber’s supposedly objective, third-party analysis. And the media ate it up.

Now the, ahem, special relationship has been revealed — but no one in the media is talking about it at all.

Ace concludes:

White House pays a flack to write a report saying exactly what they want it to say, White House sends the report out to the media as objective verification, media publishes. And publishes. And publishes. And re-publishes and surreplublishes some more.

Sound familiar? Remember when a guy named Armstrong Williams was castigated and fired, and rightfully so, for taking money from the Bush White House in exchange for promoting No Child Left Behind? This was the result of an article that appeared in the Washington Post, which stated:

Congressional Democrats immediately accused the administration of trying to bribe journalists. Williams’s newspaper syndicate, Tribune Media Services, yesterday canceled his column. And one television network dropped his program pending an investigation.

Reports by CNN and USA Today followed. CBS, God bless em’, even went out and actually investigated something on their own, and found out other commentators / bloggers were on the payroll, and the evidence wasn’t fraudulent (sorry, I HAD to go there). The New York Times chimed in. BTW, I couldn’t find an article by ABC or NBC, though I can’t imagine it wasn’t covered by the other alphabet networks, though, in the case of NBC, they may have been shy of the story as it looks like they had been dealing with a similar problem of their own. In any case, the Democratic partisan blogs were certainly all over it: P.R. Watch, Media Matters, Democratic Underground, AmericaBlog, etc, etc. Daily KOS is also absent, and can be credited with tipping off the Gruber / Obama connection.

When that story broke, the Conservative leaning Free Republic also chimed in with this:

Thanks, Armstrong (Liberal groups will rue the day the Williams scandal broke to expose their work)

Liberal interest groups will rue the day the Williams scandal broke to expose the extent of their work as paid government propagandists.

Thanks to the maneuverings of a single (formerly) syndicated columnist, the public is finally learning what a short road it is from Yes Man to Yes, I’ll Take a Check, Man.

It’s a lesson being reinforced hour by hour as Armstrong Williams appears on one television program after another issuing mea culpas for taking almost a quarter of a million dollars to help hawk the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind legislation — and, yet, steadfastly refusing to give the money back. In other words, he’s contrite, but not that contrite.

And, now, reveling in the scandal as if it were manna from heaven, the entire media establishment, left and right alike, is up in arms about this insidious example of what Frank Rich called in a recent New York Times column “pay-for-play propaganda.” A Denver Post editorial advised that “Congress should waste no time probing this latest abuse of your tax dollars at work.” The director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Media Center, Alex Jones, decried “propaganda masquerading as news, paid by government, truly a recipe from hell,” and California Democratic Rep. George Miller called the incident “worthy of Pravda.”

“Remember, this is taxpayer support for a propaganda mouthpiece,” Daily Kos’s Markos Zuniga fumed. “If Scaife or whoever wants to pay conservative writers a quarter of a million dollars to push their agenda, that’s fair game. But using public funds to pay for it is out of bounds.”….

They conclude:

Thanks to Armstrong Williams, perhaps the calls for ending government-sponsored propaganda won’t fall on the same bipartisan deaf ears.

Well, it’s only been five years, almost to the day when the Williams story broke, and… It looks like some in Washington and the media need hearing aids.

ADDENDUM:   In the Hamsher blogpost, she shows that one article, written by Ron Brownstien of The Atlantic, became the de-facto talking points memo used by the White House, the DNC, and the other parties pushing the Senate version of health care reform. Note that Gruber is interviewed just hours after the details of the bill were finally released by Harry Reid. Here is how it opens:

When I reached Jonathan Gruber on Thursday, he was working his way, page by laborious page, through the mammoth health care bill Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had unveiled just a few hours earlier. Gruber is a leading health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulted by politicians in both parties. He was one of almost two dozen top economists who sent President Obama a letter earlier this month insisting that reform won’t succeed unless it “bends the curve” in the long-term growth of health care costs. And, on that front, Gruber likes what he sees in the Reid proposal. Actually he likes it a lot.

“I’m sort of a known skeptic on this stuff,” Gruber told me. “My summary is it’s really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can’t think of a thing to try that they didn’t try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here….I can’t think of anything I’d do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn’t have done better than they are doing.”

As sort of a known skeptic myself, the opening of this article has me very curious. Assuming Gruber had not been disturbed at all in the few hours and that he is a speed reader, one regardless has to wonder just how far he could be into reading the bill before Ron Brownstien disturbed him with the call. At 2074 pages, how far could Gruber have possibly gotten in his evaluation? Some estimate it would take around 48 hours to read the whole thing. And if you’re “sort of a known skeptic on this stuff”,  wouldn’t you wait until after you’ve read the whole bill before you’ve made any grand pronouncements on how wonderful it is?

And one more question. How is it that Brownstien, of all the qualified economists to question, ends up getting the interview with the guy on the Government payroll; the one report that would certainly paint the picture of wine and roses as far as the health care bill is concerned? Did the White House or someone connected to the DNC maybe suggest the interview? I’m just curious.