Gruber Matters, at Least a Little

Let’s start with some facts we can all presumably agree on.  MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber was involved in the development of the Affordable Care Act. He attended numerous meetings with the executive branch officials while the ACA was being formulated, met with President Obama once, and stayed as a member of a Congressional Budget Office Advisory Council on Long Term Modeling for a decade, including the years when the ACA was designed. Although perhaps he exaggerated in an effort to draw attention to himself, he referred to himself, as others did, as the architect of Obamacare.  Although he is hardly President Obama himself or Senators Harry Reid, Max Baucus or then Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Professor Gruber was not a mere technocrat crunching numbers.  He is more intimately connected with the bill, more of an insider, than many other academic proponents of the legislation. And so he has described himself.