Gruber Testifies Before Congress on Obamacare Transparency Issues

Today, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber are testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on repeated transparency failures and enrollment issues surrounding the Affordable Care Act. CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman explains what this hearing could mean for ongoing Obamacare litigation efforts.

Sam Kazman, CEI general counsel:

“Regardless of what happens at the hearing, Jonathan Gruber has already had a major impact on the ongoing Obamacare litigation, as in CEI’s King v. Burwell and Halbig v. Burwell cases. This is due to both the content of his 2012 video, where Gruber refers to the subsidy issue saying if states don’t set up exchanges then citizens won’t get tax credits, and to how the government dropped nearly all mention of Gruber and his three-legged stool analogy from the court briefs following the video’s rise in popularity.

“And according to a recent CEI report by Scot Vorse, we see that Gruber isn’t the only thing the administration flip-flopped on. Based on a trail of government documents, we find that actions taken by the HHS, Treasury, and IRS to implement the law, especially when it comes to developing a tax-credit calculator, show the administration was only focused on providing subsidies on the state exchanges, not the federal exchange.”

>> View CEI report by Scot Vorse: “Beyond Gruber: How HHS Flip-Flopped on Federal Exchange Subsidies”