Who is Jon Gruber?

[JollyRoger]

Healthcare has gone downhill ever since doctors stopped making housecalls and accepting payment in the form of chickens.

 

[onejayhawk]

Between not having universal healthcare, and having it, I would choose the latter option. Obama Care isn't perfect, but it is a workable system. Can it be demonstrably proven that the current system is worse than the old one? Just because everyone has highlighted its faults doesn't mean the old system was perfect or even better, it was just less controversial. If it really was that good there wouldn't have been a demand for health care reform.

Anything can be made to work. It will not work well, cause more trouble and cost a great deal more money, but it will work.

The series of bills that became ACA was never universal health care. That was one of the big lies Gruber was telling. The Republicans were saying so back then, to anyone that would listen. Naturally they were accused of lying.

Healthcare has gone downhill ever since doctors stopped making housecalls and accepting payment in the form of chickens.

That might be funny if people didn't believe it.

J

 

[Cutlass]

Alternatively, Joe Lieberman, who was voted out of the Democratic party because he refused to take their journey to extreme leftopoia.

That same Democratic party which has been moving steadily to the right for the past 30 years?

 

[bhsup]

You always say that but it simply is not true. If anything, the GOP has been drifting left.

 

[Antilogic]

That's rich.

You should do standup, brah.

 

[Hygro]

You always say that but it simply is not true. If anything, the GOP has been drifting left.

You might want to qualify this one....

 

[JollyRoger]

You always say that but it simply is not true. If anything, the GOP has been drifting left.

That's a VRWC.

 

[Algeroth]

Grubergate

Ok, nothing to see her, move along citizens.

 

[Kaitzilla]

You might want to qualify this one....

Well, the Blue Dog Democrats (moderates) went from 54 members in 2008 to 14 members in 2012.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Coalition

Back up to 19 members after the 2014 election thankfully.

 

[bhsup]

You might want to qualify this one....

Well, let's take a look at the democrats. They have gone from Tip O'Neill in the House and a former leader in the KKK (I think most would call the KKK a far right extremist group) in the Senate as the Congressional leaders to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in the Senate. If you deny that being a leftward shift, I really don't know what to say.

Republicans have been, I would say, pacing them almost equally on the leftward migration, which is why folks like Lieberman almost look more like Republicans now than Democrats. Another Democratic titan, Sam Nunn, would probably be accused of being an extremist right winger by modern Democrats.

 

[JollyRoger]

Ronald Reagan would be accused of being an extreme lefty by most Republicans today.

 

[onejayhawk]

Ronald Reagan would be accused of being an extreme lefty by most Republicans today.

That would be GW Bush. Reagan fits in fine. Talk about reducing government, but expand the military. Talk a lot about family values. Give most of your attention to deregulation, which does make it a good period to be an entrepreneur. Above all talk about how things will work out.

J

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

You might want to qualify this one....

According to his many-posted graphic it means Bhsup is drifting right.

I are learning!

 

[bhsup]

Well that's only natural as one ages.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

That means I'm immortal! :more banana:

 

[bhsup]

Only because you don't live in the USA. ObamaCare death panels, you know...

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

No, no. Drifting is a relative pastime.

I am immortal.

And so is my wife.

 

[onejayhawk]

Only because you don't live in the USA. ObamaCare death panels, you know...

Be serious. They aren't called death panels. They aren't even panels. They're called priority guidelines.

The VA uses them too. You may have heard.

J

 

[Kaitzilla]

I really enjoyed this article:
http://www.hoover.org/research/fatal-conceit-jonathan-gruber

The Times reassuringly described Gruber as “the numbers wizard at MIT,” who has “spent decades modeling the intricacies of the health care ecosystem.” Gruber has “brought a level of science to an issue that would otherwise be just opinion.”

I might note that the Soviets used the term “science” for their own “scientific” planning commission. I drew little comfort from Professor Gruber’s scientific-planning credentials, especially when I learned “he’s the only person you can go to for that kind of thing.” Gruber, aided by his brilliant MIT graduate student assistants, is a one-man Gosplan, the name given to the Soviet Union’s state planning committee. That is not much of a recommendation. Science is better served by competing ideas not by a one-person monopoly.

Both Gruber and the USSR’s Gosplan planners believe their planning is “scientific” and executed by “the best of the best.” Both types of planning commissars suffer from F. A. Hayek’s “fatal conceit”—the belief that we can plan incredibly complex economic systems. As Hayek pointed out in his writings, such “scientific” plans inevitably fall apart under the weight of unintended consequences.

Gruber’s widely publicized revelations about the political strategy of pushing through landmark legislation that voters would reject if they “understood” what was in it is typical of the scientific planner mindset. Scientific planners like Gruber believe that they know better what ordinary people need than the people themselves, that people are too stupid to make decisions for themselves, and that more intelligent technocrats must intervene in their lives on their behalf.

ObamaCare will puncture Gruber’s balloon, later if not sooner. The lesson that Gruber will learn is that ordinary people are actually smarter than the scientific planners. Gruber’s hoi polloi will learn how to circumvent the planners’ genial rules and instructions just as they have done in the past with other regulatory efforts, They will game the system to produce unintended consequences that send the Grubers of the world back to the drawing boards to change their rules only to be out gamed by so-called ignorant ordinary people once again.

The problem is that Gruber is not the hard scientists he believes he is. Rocket scientists can launch a manned aircraft on a trajectory to a space station that arrives on the minute. They use the laws of physics in their real “scientific” planning. They do not need to worry about how the space station will behave when the space ship approaches, and their task is specific and well defined.

Scientific-planner Gruber, however, must write software codes for an entire healthcare ecosystem of hundreds of millions of patients, millions of health-care providers, thousands of insurance companies, and hundreds of state and local governments. Unlike space scientists, ObamaCare planners must predict how patients, physicians, businesses, nurses, insurers, state officials, and other actors will react to thousands of rules, instructions, mandates, incentives, and penalties in a newly-minted health system.

Professor Gruber must use “behavioral assumptions” to guesstimate, among thousands of other things, how many young people will ignore the mandate, how many employers will drop coverage, and how providers will react to new incentives and compensation schemes.

Do not worry, says the Times. Gruber’s behavioral assumptions are “based on past experience and economic theory.” But where is “past experience” when we entirely revamp our health-care system? Economic theory, at best, may give us the first-order directions of change, but it is helpless to account for the all-important higher-order effects and feedbacks. We economists hold the secret of how little we really know close to our vests.

Gosplan’s “numbers wizards” could not program the over demanding, capacity understating, false reporting, and side-deal-making machinations of planned enterprises. Likewise, MIT and Washington elites cannot imagine themselves in the shoes of “ordinary” patients, nurses, drug manufacturers, or small businesses. They always underestimate how easy it is to game the system, and how sensitive ordinary people are to incentives.

If individuals feel trapped in a system they do not respect and that offends their values, there are no limits to ObamaCare’s unintended consequences. How many middle-income households will suffer mysterious income losses to qualify for Medicaid? How many businesses will shed employees to escape mandates? How many voluntarily uninsured will simply disappear from the radar screen?

The politics of NASA’s scientists and engineers do not affect manned space flights. ObamaCare’s behavioral assumptions, intended or not, inevitably reflect political biases. Although a “card carrying democrat,” the Times assures us that Gruber is trusted by both political parties “because he was seen as an econometric wonk, not a political agent.” (Even after he wrote opinion pieces supporting ObamaCare without disclosing his role and authored a comic book to explain the law?) Gruber’s own characterization of individual insurance markets as “unfair” tells us where he stands. Would his model conclude that we are best off with unfettered private insurance markets?

There’s more to worry about: Gosplan’s “scientific” plan set only a few macro parameters. The real producing, delivering, and selling at the enterprise level was dictated by faceless norm setters, rate engineers, and other rule makers. What went on after the plan was finished was much more important than the plan itself. ObamaCare is no different and perhaps worse.

The whole thing is great.

The first inevitable unintended consequence is right on time.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/25/obama-amnesty-obamacare-clash-businesses-have-3000/

Under the president’s new amnesty, businesses will have a $3,000-per-employee incentive to hire illegal immigrants over native-born workers because of a quirk of Obamacare.

President Obama’s temporary amnesty, which lasts three years, declares up to 5 million illegal immigrants to be lawfully in the country and eligible for work permits, but it still deems them ineligible for public benefits such as buying insurance on Obamacare’s health exchanges.

Under the Affordable Care Act, that means businesses who hire them won’t have to pay a penalty for not providing them health coverage — making them $3,000 more attractive than a similar native-born worker, whom the business by law would have to cover.

Now it will be even harder for young people to get jobs.


They already have to compete with older folks refusing to retire.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money...f-older-workers-take-jobs-from-young/4305187/

James Galbraith, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, has advocated for a temporary lowering of the age to qualify for Social Security and Medicare to allow older workers who don't want to remain on the job a way to exit and to spur openings for younger workers.

He doesn't buy the comparison of older workers to women entering the workforce and says others' arguments on older workers expanding the economy don't make sense when there are so many unemployed people. If there was a surplus of jobs, he said, there would be no problem with people working longer. But there isn't.

"I can't imagine how you could refute that. The older worker retires, the employer looks around and hires another worker," he said. "It's like refuting elementary arithmetic."

Melissa Quercia, 35, a controller for a small information technology company in Phoenix, said she sees signs of the generational job battle all around her: jobs once taken by high schoolers now filled by seniors, college graduates who can't find work anywhere, the resulting dearth of experience of younger applicants. She doesn't see economists' arguments playing out. Older people staying on the job aren't spurring new jobs, because companies aren't investing in creating new positions, she said.

"It's really hard to retire right now, I understand that," she said. "But if the younger generation doesn't have a chance to get their foot in the door, then what?"

Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who edited a book on the subject for the National Bureau of Economic Research, said it's a frustrating reality of his profession: That those things he knows as facts are disputed by the populace.

"If you polled the average American they probably would think the opposite," he said. "There's a lot of things economists say that people don't get and this is just one of them."

And there's Gruber again!
Man that guy is everywhere.
Is he arguing that people and their stupid common sense are stupid again?

My comparison of ObamaCare and Soviet planning reminds me of an old Soviet joke: Men dressed in suits carrying brief cases march alongside tanks and missiles at the May Day parade. A boy asks his father: “Why are those men in a military parade?” Answer: ‘Those are the economists; they are the most dangerous of all.”

 

[JollyRoger]

That would be GW Bush. Reagan fits in fine. Talk about reducing government, but expand the military. Talk a lot about family values. Give most of your attention to deregulation, which does make it a good period to be an entrepreneur. Above all talk about how things will work out.

J

Talking and doing are two different things. Massive deficits and spending, 7 years of raising taxes, cutting and running instead of fighting terrorists, amnesty for illegals . . .