I must admit about being confused about how much of Gruber’s money was his HHS grant and how much was paid as a consultant.

“Become” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Reminds me of this very awesome bit from Speed:

Howard Payne: There’s gonna come a time, boy, when you will wish you never met me.
Jack: Mister, I’m already there!

I was able to make it through, like, two paragraphs. Jane really needs a fucking editor.

Well, that does clarify my question above about what money was what.  I hate to say it, but she may have a point and may have caught Krugman being lazy.

Not so sure, gimme.  Here’s what the contract (grant?) with HHS involved:

On February 25, the Department of Health & Human Services began a presolicitation of Gruber’s services on a “sole-source basis” to “developed a proprietary statistically sophisticated micro-simulation model” to analyze, advise, and report on all the elements relating to insurance.  The HHS synopsis says:

  The information will facilitate the Office of Health Reform’s efforts to develop proposals to increase access to affordable health insurance for all Americans.

What he signed up to develop was a model that he or other experts in this field could use to evaluate HCR proposals. Jane seems to be conflating this with peddling a particular theory:

Gruber was brought on board to do what everyone knew he would do: use his models, and his credibility as an academic at MIT, to promote the excise tax.

But he wasn’t brought on to promote the excise tax. He was working to develop a mathematical model.

I am asked to develop simulations to examine various design parameters in my own area of expertise. But, that doesn’t come with any guarantee of my conclusions. All bets are off on that front.

I agree with AltHippo.  Jane’s rather shrill rant implies that the administration developed the idea that the excise tax was the way to go then basically bribed Gruber to develop a “research model” that would support that.  In fact it appears that the statistical models he developed pointed in that direction and that’s why it was added to the bill and is being supported by the White House.

The fact of the matter is that tax free employer provided health insurance is unfair to all Americans who pay for health insurance on their own with after tax dollars (unless they are self employed and can deduct it that way).  Imposing an excise tax so-called “Cadillac” plans is, in fact, one way of beginning to address that inequity.

In my heart of hearts I believe either everyone should be able to deduct health insurance premiums or no one should.  But taking away that tax-free status for all the people enrolled in employer plans or paying for it as self employed individuals would cause a massive uproar and probably couldn’t be implemented.

That’s “imposing an excise tax on so-called Cadillac plans”.  Too lazy to go into admin and correct it. ;-)

AltHippo, that last paragraph in your blockquote is what actually concerns me about the Gruber contract - a sole-source award to develop a proprietary model.

WTF?  Unless Gruber is the only person out there capable of this kind of work - and how sad would that be? - how could competition (i.e., multiple ideas/approaches) NOT be welcome in the process like this?

The most charitable view I can come up with is that Obama’s team saw (correctly, I think) that time was of the essence in the Congressional political sausage-making, and they simply didn’t have the luxury of a more drawn-out process to get the technical expertise inputs optimized the way one would like for something this important.  But, I dunno…

AltHippo, that last paragraph in your blockquote is what actually concerns me about the Gruber contract - a sole-source award to develop a proprietary model.

Actually, this is really common in my world. Someone has an algorithm that’s been developed over a number of years, and gets a government agency to fund the next step.

These days this is usually done through an SBIR grant. But, if Gruber works for MIT, then he’d have to look for funding through various government agencies.