Massachusetts Governor Baker soon gets to show us how much he represents the real people of Massachusetts and the United States. Or, as I believed (and therefore blanked the Massachusetts governor's race last month), he's just another elitist goo goo in the Christian-Herter/Frank-Sargent/William-Weld/just-off-the-Mayflower Massachusetts-Republican crowd that ruined Massachusetts in the 20th century. Unbelievably, the new Massachusetts Republican governor is reportedly considering reappointing Jonathan Gruber to the Massachusetts Health Connector Authority as the governor's economist designee.
It is unclear if Gruber has a specific term expiring on such and such a date or if he serves at the pleasure of the sitting governor. It is clear that Gruber holds a seat designated specifically for an economist. If the term is fixed, Governor Baker should push Gruber out the way Governor Romney pushed out the Congressional-Committee-staller William Bulger from the presidency of the University of Massachusetts.
I am not saying that Gruber should be fired from the Massachusetts Healthcare Connector Authority because of the truthful statements he made on videodisc in 2011-2013 concerning the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Acts ((e.g., Democratic congresspeople were stupid to vote for it, the Cadillac tax is a trick to end employer sponsored healthcare insurance (ESI), the law says the Federal government cannot give subsidies to people that buy insurance on the Federal exchange, and so forth)). Instead Gruber should not be reappointed and/or should be fired by Baker because
- Gruber never tells the truth about the Massachusetts merged market and the AHIP study of 2007
- He does not tell the truth about how the old RomneyCare exchange worked
- He misleads people outside Massachusetts concerning the increase in the number of people taking up ESI as opposed to being offered ESI
- He did not seem to tell the truth about being on his smart phone during Connector Authority meetings in 2012 and early 2013 and therefore not knowing the new exchange would not work.
Basically Gruber should not be reappointed because of his lack of honesty about things he was responsible for here in Massachusetts from 2006 to 2014, not for telling the truth about how he lied to Congressional Democrats prior to the Obamacare vote in 2009-2010.