Last week news broke that MIT economist Jonathan Gruber failed to disclose that he was paid almost $400,000 to consult with the White House on health care reform. Gruber never mentioned this even though he repeatedly commented favorably on the Democratic health care proposals. That’s bad enough, but Jane Hamsher at the Huffington Post points out that Gruber’s comments on the bills have been treated as independent analysis by the White House and Congressional Democrats and then in turn repeated by the media. Here’s Hamsher with some of the details:
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.
The next day on the 21st, Ron Brownstein wrote in the Atlantic about Gruber’s effusive praise for the cost-cutting measures in the bill: “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,” says Gruber.
On Monday the 23rd, the DNC was sending the Brownstein column around in its entirety…one of 71 emails they would send touting Gruber’s work. It was also included in OFA’s Monday Morning News Clips on BarackObama.com.
And so forth. This actually bears an uncanny resemblance to the way the Bush White House spread its faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq War. Scooter Libby in the White House fed Judith Miller at the New York Times the bad intelligence, and when she reported it, White House officials used the stories as third party verification of their claims. Just goes to show that it doesn’t matter what part is in power; they both still act like used car dealers lying straight to your face to unload a junker on you for top dollar.
Link via Peter Suderman at Hit and Run.
