RUTHFULLY YOURS

Just for the record: Rep. Tom Price is a staunch supporter of Israel and ranked a minus 4 from the Arab American institute. As Tevye said ” it doesn’t make much difference but it’s nice to know.” rsk
WASHINGTON—President-elect Donald Trump has chosen House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R., Ga.) as his nominee for secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, according to a transition team adviser, putting the six-term congressman in charge of the sprawling agency that will likely dismantle Democrats’ 2010 health-care overhaul.

Mr. Price, a 62-year-old former orthopedic surgeon, is one of several GOP physicians who sought to carve out a leading role in shaping the party’s health policy and, in particular, the party’s alternative vision to Democrats’ Affordable Care Act. Much of his criticism of the law has centered on the authority it gives to the federal government, and to the agency that he may now head.
“We think it’s important that Washington not be in charge of health care,” he said in an interview this summer. “The problem that I have with Obamacare is that its premise is that Washington knows best.”

He has championed his own legislation, the Empowering Patients First Act, since 2009, taking a position on a number of hot-button issues for conservative health policy thinkers. In its latest iteration, the proposal includes refundable, age-adjusted tax credits for people to buy insurance if they don’t have access to coverage through an employer or government program. People in a government program, such as Medicare, Medicaid or Tricare, would also be allowed to opt out of it and get tax credits toward the cost of private coverage instead.

Mr. Price had previously included tax deductions in his plans, a tool typically favored by harder-line conservative health policy thinkers, but said he had “moved towards credits because we felt it was cleaner.”

COLUMBUS, Ohio—At least 11 people were injured Monday at Ohio State University after a student allegedly jumped a curb in a motor vehicle, then slashed pedestrians with a butcher knife before he was shot and killed.

Officials identified the suspect as Abdul Razak Ali Artan, who was listed in the student directory as a logistics-management major at the business school. Officials didn’t provide a motive for the attack and couldn’t confirm his exact age.

Those injured in the attack were taken to Columbus-area hospitals to be treated for stab wounds and motor-vehicle injuries, as well as other injuries still being assessed. At least two victims have come out of surgery, said officials at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center, where six of the victims were sent. Most of those injured were students, officials said.

“We all live with the fear that things like this could happen to us,” Ohio State President Michael Drake said at a news conference outside the hospital Monday afternoon. “We live in an unstable world.”

Officials said the suspect intentionally drove a vehicle over a curb to hit a number of pedestrians before jumping out of the car with a knife. A campus police officer arrived within a minute and shot and killed the suspect when he failed to comply with the officer’s commands, the officials said.

“The first responders did a remarkable job,” Ohio Governor John Kasich said at a press conference Monday afternoon. “It shows how much practice, how much training, how much expertise and how much coordination existed with campus police, Columbus police” and other agencies, he said.

The car struck seven or eight pedestrians at approximately 9:52 a.m. ET, according to Ohio State Director of Public Safety Monica Moll, and an officer had engaged with the suspect within a minute. The school’s alert system sent out its first message at 9:55 a.m. ET.

Police have recovered the knife used in the attack and were processing the scene.

This character evidently lacks shame as well as veracity.

A stable human being, having earned national notoriety by admitting that he participated in a conspiracy to deceive the voters on an important public policy issue, would not expect them to believe anything else he had to say on the subject. This would be particularly true if he had also said that the deception was predicated on the stupidity of those voters. Jonathan Gruber committed both offences, of course, but he evidently isn’t “stable” in the way psychiatrists use the term. He not only expects to be taken seriously on the same issue, he’s still trying to deceive the public.

Gruber, in case you have forgotten, is the MIT economics professor who frequently referred to himself as the “father of Obamacare” during the long health reform debate that culminated in the passage of the ironically titled “Affordable Care Act.” He became an unperson two years ago when a video emerged in which he delivered himself of the following words of wisdom concerning the law: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.… And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”

Now, he’s attempting to make a comeback by defending the “reform” law from repeal. In an opinion piece published yesterday in the NewYork Daily News, Gruber demonstrated that he still thinks we’re a bunch of brain dead morons. He begins by telling the long-suffering readers of that publication that the law has been a success. In support of this preposterous claim, he offers the same talking points we have been getting from the Obama administration. He glibly repeats, for example, the following whopper: “Twenty million Americans have gained insurance coverage.”

This figure was long ago abandoned by all but the most dishonest Obamacare pimps. It first originated in a widely panned report published in the New England Journal of Medicine. When this work of bad fiction first appeared, Reason’s Peter Suderman debunked it in a column titled, “No, 20 Million Haven’t ‘Gained Coverage’ Under Obamacare,” where he pointed out that the report indiscriminately included anyone who bought insurance: “It’s a count of people obtaining coverage, whether or not they had it before, not people who were previously uninsured.”

Another lie Gruber repeats in yesterday’s piece is this long-ago-debunked tale: “Since the ACA’s passage, health-care costs have grown at their slowest rate in measured U.S. history; the innovative cost controls put in place by the law are one important reason why.” He knows perfectly well that this slowdown in health care inflation has nothing to do with Obamacare. As this report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid shows, the slowdown began seven years before the “Affordable Care Act” passed. Gruber hopes his readers are too dumb to know that.

Gruber also claims that the most hated of Obamacare’s provisions, the individual mandate, can’t be repealed because it is needed to “bring the healthy into the insurance pool.” He doesn’t tell us where he has been hiding out since his fall from grace two years ago. But, unless he has been locked up and denied access to newspapers, the internet, television, twitter, etc., he will have noticed that the individual mandate just isn’t working. He knows that, of course. A more plausible explanation is that Dr. Gruber still thinks his readers are just too “stupid” to know the truth.

He is posing as the only person in the galaxy who doesn’t know that the mandate has failed to “bring the healthy into the insurance pool.” As Modern Healthcare reports, “Only 28% of exchange members in 2014 were in the coveted 18-34 age range, and that percentage stayed level for 2016. It’s below the 40% level many actuaries say is needed.” In other words, the individual mandate that Dr. Gruber and Obamacare’s other architects insisted upon over the objections of the electorate has not prevented the adverse selection problem it was ostensibly meant to forestall.