Krugman defends Gruber and himself
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: Krugman defends Gruber and himself
Date: Jan 15, 2010 6:11 PM
ARTICLE BELOW
============================================
Well, I find it hard to believe
an economist could fix the healthcare
disaster, when the healthcare disaster
was caused by BigInsurance sticking their
big RICO nose in it, manipulating
disease definitions and guidelines
for the last 20 years at least.
You can't *START* from the position
that whatever the CDC, BigPharma or
BigInsurance says is true about diseases,
medicines or costs. Instead, we should start
with understanding the most costly, disabling
diseases and see how they resulted from all
the *FRAUD* and scams?
Rheumatoid Arthritis?
Mycoplasma.
MS, ALS, and many cancers?
Mycoplasma or something like it or
something that is the result of it.
BigPharma prefers to treat people indefinitely
symptom-wise, while BigAgriculture continues
to donate antibiotic resistance genes in
feed, while Lyme and other infections victims
take the heat.
Psychiatry keeps making up diseases
like Bipolar, so that their victims
end up drugged and brain damaged by
*polypharmacy,* and then who picks up
the bill when their victims are a *total*
*wreck?*
Social Security Disability.
The Autism Epidemic?
BigInsurance isn't paying for molds:
http://www.actionlyme.org/ANTHRAX_SWEEG_KNOWS.htm
"Last November, the American Association of Insurance Services
(aais.org) filed a new virus and bacteria exclusion designed to
prevent insurance company losses that may arise from claims related to
infectious diseases and bioterrorism. "Coverage is excluded for loss,
cost, or expense caused by, resulting from, or relating to any virus,
bacterium, or other microorganism that causes or is capable of causing
disease, illness, or physical distress. In addition, the exclusion
explicitly applies to any loss, cost or expense arising from denial of
access to property because of any...microorganisms." The exclusion is
designed for commercial and farm insurance policies, but there is no
reason to think it will not eventually trickle down to homeowners and
small businesses."
Please.
We don't need more Unscience thrown
into the Bigs' and the DHHS' TOTAL
BRAINSCRAMBLE on "healthcare."
It took us 9 long years to finally
straighten out Anthony Fauci.
KMDickson
=======================
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/more-on-jon-gruber/
January 15, 2010, 4:45 pm
More on Jon Gruber
Today Glenn Greenwald accused me of being a hypocrite for defending
Jonathan Gruber, the health care economist who has become a target of
some progressive opponents of the health care plan. He writes:
Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing
pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments,
and said they lack “intellectual integrity”; he specifically cited the
Armstrong Williams case. Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week
attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by
accusing her of being “just like the right-wingers with their endless
supply of fake scandals.” What is one key difference? Unlike Williams
and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with
Good Views — he favors health care — and so massive, undisclosed
payments from the same administration he’s defending are dismissed as
a “fake scandal.”
What’s wrong with this accusation? Everything. Armstrong Williams
received a contract specifically to promote Bush administration
policies; his duties under the contract were to “regularly comment” on
these policies on his program, and to interview Bush administration
officials. In short, he was being paid to serve as a propagandist.
What was Gruber contracted to do? He emails:
I was contracted with HHS for technical modeling assistance. When
designing a policy like this, policy makers want to consider a million
different permutations: different AVs, tax credit amounts, employer
assessments, etc. Basically, in a perfect world, we would all just
rely on CBO for all these permutations. But CBO has limited resources
and can’t work directly with the administration. So I provided the
administration & congress (mostly senate finance) with the kind of
modeling that CBO does to help them narrow options to a more
manageable list that they could send to CBO.
That is, he was hired as an economist, paid to provide technical
analysis — not as a pundit, paid to promote policies to the public.
Maybe Glenn Greenwald can’t see any difference between the two — and
the more of this I read, the more sense I have that the attackers are
deliberately obfuscating the difference — but they really aren’t the
same.
Now, there have been sweetheart consulting deals in the past, which
were really a way of buying support. And if Gruber were a highly
implausible candidate for this kind of consulting, you might suspect
that this was one of them. But Gruber had a well-established record as
a prominent health care modeler long before any of this came along;
here’s a quick list from Google Scholar. It was perfectly natural that
he would be hired to do this.
In fact, it’s hard to see who else you could have hired. Modeling
health reform is a very detail-driven business: you need a detailed
statistical representation of the population, together with detailed
estimates of behavioral responses to incentives. Gruber has spent
years developing such a model, which is maintained and update at
considerable expense. Who else could bring the same resources to bear?
Well, I guess the administration could have turned to the Lewin Group,
but aside from the fact that Gruber has such sterling academic
credentials, Lewin is owned by United Healthcare.
In other words, Gruber is a real authority, and the obvious person to
fill a needed role. As I’ve written before, he should have taken more
pains to reveal that role. But there was nothing corrupt about the
arrangement.
Given that Gruber was providing this kind of technical consulting,
should he have recused himself entirely from the public debate? Should
he have stopped writing op-eds and, more important, technical papers
read by the likes of Ezra Klein and myself? If he had, the public
debate would have been much poorer; again, there aren’t many people in
a position to do the kind of quantitative assessments Gruber does.
And one more thing: what Gruber has had to say about health reform in
the current debate is entirely consistent with his previous academic
work. There’s not a hint that he has changed views, or altered his
model, to accommodate the Obama administration.
Yes, Gruber has been commenting on health care while doing technical
consulting for the administration. But there is nothing wrong with
that. More disclosure would have been a good idea — but there is no
scandal whatsoever.
And here’s the thing: by claiming that there’s a huge scandal when
nothing worse happened than insufficient care about disclosure,
Greenwald and the people at FDL are actually reducing our ability to
call foul on real corruption. After all, if everything is a scandal,
nothing is a scandal. One of these days, perhaps soon, we’ll have a
genuinely corrupt administration again — but when whistleblowers try
to call attention to the misdeeds, you can be sure that there will be
claims that “even liberals said that Obama did things just as bad or
worse.” The crusade against Gruber is getting really destructive.
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci