Meet Jonathan Gruber, well-respected economist PR flack
Photo: NBER.org
Jonathan Gruber has been a major supporter of Obama-style healthcare reform.
Jonathan Gruber has a major conflict of interest:
MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the leading academic defenders of health care reform, is taking heat for failing to disclose consistently that he was under contract with the Department of Health and Human Services while he was touting the Democrats' health proposals in the media. Gruber, according to federal government documents, is under a $297,600 contract until next month to provide "technical assistance" in evaluating health care reform proposals. He was under a $95,000 HHS contract before that.Source: FoxNews
Gruber has been one of the major defenders of ObamaCare over the past few months, writing a number of glowing articles that, in retrospect, read like administration press releases:
Gruber's most important role in pushing ObamaCare was to be the economic expert who refuted the CBO cost estimates of the bill. Each time Gruber defended ObamaCare, his writings were reported as fact by left-leaning news outlets and blogs:
A new analysis by a leading MIT economist provides new ammunition for Democrats as the Senate begins formally debating the historic health-reform bill being pushed by President Barack Obama.The report concludes that under the Senate’s health-reform bill, Americans buying individual coverage will pay less than they do for today's typical individual market coverage, and would be protected from high out-of-pocket costs.Gruber’s conclusion: “[F]or those facing purchase in the non-group market, the … bill will deliver savings ranging from $200 for singles to $500 for families in today’s dollars – even without subsidies. The savings are much larger for lower income populations that receive premium credits.Source: Politico
You can read Gruber's paper - "The Senate Bill Lowers Non-Group Premiums - Updated for New CBO Estimates."
Now that Gruber has been outed as a highly PR flack, will ObamaCare be delayed for Congressional hearings into this scandal? Don't hold your breath...
BONUS DEATH PANEL UPDATE:
Gruber co-authored a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled, "Patient Cost-Sharing, Hospitalization Offsets, and the Design of Optimal Health Insurance for the Elderly." According to the synopsis on NBER's website, the paper concluded that artificially raising the cost of medicine and hospital stays would discourage some elderly patients from seeking treatment, thus lowering costs to the government:
The authors find that elderly patients are quite price sensitive in their health care consumption. A $10 increase in the office visit copayment reduces utilization by 0.13 visits per member per month, a decline of nearly 20 percent. In their preferred estimate, the authors find that a 10 percent increase in price is associated with a 14 percent decline in utilization, a far greater effect than that found in the RAND study. However, the authors caution that the comparison may be misleading, since their study is based on copayments as opposed to coinsurance rates, and patients may be unaware of how one translates into the other.The authors also examine the price sensitivity of prescription drug use. They find that a modest ($7 to $8) increase in the average drug copayment reduces drug utilization by 20% for HMO patients and by 6% for PPO patients. The stronger response among HMO patients may be due to the fact that their copayment increase affected both generic and branded drugs, while the increase for PPO patients affected branded drugs only. Next, the authors ask whether the reduction in prescription drug utilization is due primarily to reduced use of drugs that affect quality of life, such as drugs to control allergies or acne, or whether there is also reduced use of drugs that control acute life-threatening conditions and chronic conditions. They find that the demand for all types of drugs is quite sensitive to priceThe study's results have several interesting policy implications. First, they suggest that the "doughnut hole" in the new Medicare prescription drug benefit could increase Medicare's costs - as chronically ill patients are faced with paying the full cost of their medications, some will reduce drug use and end up being hospitalized down the road. More generally, the results suggest that in the optimal health insurance plan, cost sharing would be tied to health status, with chronically ill patients facing lower cost sharing.
This fits right in with the administration's recommendations on reducing access to mammograms and pap smears - each designed to reduce costs, in keeping Ezekiel Emanuel's philosophies on rationed healthcare services. And who could forget President Obama's pain pill comment?
