MONTPELIER, Vt. — Vermont’s state government has stopped payment on the contract of Jonathan Gruber following a series of video statements showing the Obamacare architect repeatedly insulting voters and intentionally misleading the public in the crafting of the Affordable Care Act.
On Wednesday, Lawrence Miller, chief of health care reform for the Gov. Peter Shumlin administration, announced that Vermont would stop payment of Gruber’s $400,000 contract with the state.
As of this week, Vermont has paid Gruber $160,000 on a contract that began July 21 and was expected to continue until Feb. 15.
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Miller said Gruber, an MIT economist, will provide all deliverables specified in the contract for the upcoming January presentation to the legislature of Shumlin’s financing plan for single-payer health care. He will not receive any additional payments, but his assistants stand to receive $120,000 for the duration of the contract.
Gruber has contracts with the federal government and at least eight states totaling about $6 million.
Last week, a series of videos went viral in which Gruber made disparaging comments about the “stupidity” of American voters.
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One video, shot by TruthNorthReports.com and released Friday, featured Gruber attending a 2011 Vermont House Health Care Committee meeting and quipping that the written concerns of one Vermonter regarding single-payer might have been written by his “adolescent children.”
Those comments actually were written by John McClaughry, a former two-term Vermont state senator and adviser to President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
In other videos, including one shot at the University of Pennsylvania in October 2013, Gruber called the lack of government transparency “a huge political advantage,”and said it was impossible to have transparent financing and spending because of the “stupidity of the American voter.”
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Gruber’s work for Vermont pertains to financing and spending for Green Mountain Care, the name given to the state’s new universal, publicly financed health care program.
Gruber declined comment on the decision by the Shumlin administration.
Read more of this story Watchdog.org.
Editor’s note: An earlier story about Vermont’s contract with Jonathan Gruber was outdated. This version includes the latest developments. Read the original story at Watchdog.org.
