"Ask him," Conyers responded with a slight smile, while pointing at the conference room door through which Dean had left.
Amid the needless complexities of the ACA, President Obama signed the more general Plain Writing Act of 2010, which requires that federal agencies use "clear Government communication that the public can understand and use."
Here and Now
These days, a progressive overview of Gruber-gate comes from Jerry Policoff, a senior editor at OpEdNews and a longtime advocate for single-payer health care.
"Gruber played a huge part in the creation and marketing of Obamacare while holding down an HHS contract that put hundreds of thousands of dollars in his pocket," Policoff told me. "This created something of a scandal when Firedoglake revealed it. Back then all of the Obama people were defending Gruber. Now they say 'Jonathan who?'"
Gruber has been a cog in the corporate cronyism that spreads from Washington to the rest of the country. While most attention has belatedly focused on his HHS grants awarded "sole-source" -- that is, with only him eligible for receipt -- that is only part of his income from such work.
In Did Jonathan Gruber earn 'almost $400,000" from the Obama administration? Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler reported that Gruber has won at least eight state contracts likely averaging over $400,000 apiece based on the information available from four of them. Kessler reported that the dollar amounts could not be found for four of the contracts.
"Gruber has also earned more than $2 million over the last seven years," Kessler wrote, "for an ongoing contract with HHS to assess choices made by the elderly in Medicare's prescription-drug plan."
This largely hidden income from public sources was doubtless a factor -- along with partisan politics, of course -- in Congressman Issa's demand that Gruber stop stonewalling on the amounts.
As for the ACA, Policoff says:
"I am planning to write a piece laying bare the premise that Obamacare is a success and is generally popular among people who understand it."
"It is not affordable in most cases," Policoff continued. "It is not even close to universal, and many people who have interacted with it are not at all pleased. It was basically a gift to the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance industry, as well as to the big hospital cartels."
"Gruber's sin," Policoff concludes, "is that, in a weak honest moment, he admitted that Obamacare was sold with smoke and mirrors because the public never would have bought into it if they understood it. It remains unpopular not because it is being unfairly vilified, but rather because large swaths of the public have come to realize how bad it really is."
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