Krugman: More on Jon Gruber - Democratic Underground

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Fri Jan-15-10 05:35 PM
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Krugman: More on Jon Gruber

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.

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