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Issa has subpoenaed Gruber on health law

The Columbian
Published: December 15, 2014, 4:00pm

WASHINGTON — Economist Jonathan Gruber apologized before a congressional panel last week for comments he made about the political process behind the Affordable Care Act, but he declined to say how much the Obama administration paid him for consulting work on the health care law.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., is not letting that go. As one of his final acts as chairman of the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, he issued a subpoena Thursday demanding that Gruber hand over all documents and communications with government officials related to his work on the law.

“As one of the architects of Obamacare, Jonathan Gruber is in a unique position to shed light on the ‘lack of transparency’ surrounding the passage of the president’s health care law,” Issa said in a statement Friday. “The American people deserve not just an apology, but a full accounting, which Mr. Gruber must provide.”

The Obama administration paid Gruber, a professor at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about $400,000 for a system to help predict how the Congressional Budget Office would score the Affordable Care Act.

Gruber said at a forum several years ago that the creators of the health care legislation used “tortured language” to keep parts of the measure from being scored as tax increases. He added that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” because of “the stupidity of the American voter.”

At a hearing a week ago with the Oversight Committee, Gruber said his comments were out of line.

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