Since the video surfaced last month of Jonathan Gruber admitting that deceiving the American public was necessary to pass Obamacare, several more videos have been discovered of the Obamacare architect singing the same tune. The value in Gruber’s comments is that they expose the collectivist ideology underlying Obamacare.
I’ll be in Atlanta this week to discuss the latest issues surrounding health care. If you’re in the area, I hope you can stop by one or both of these events.
By now you’ve probably seen the video of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber, in which he admits that deceiving the American public, whom he calls “stupid,” was necessary in order to pass the law. Since the video went viral, Gruber has tried to walk back his comments amid a hail of rebukes. But perhaps we should thank him: his comments in the video expose the ideology underlying Obamacare. Gruber put into words the collectivist mindset behind how Obamacare was passed and the law’s substance.
On November 4, 2014, ARI fellow Don Watkins gave his talk “End the Debt Draft: How the Welfare State Is Exploiting Millennials” to the Capitalism and Global Supply Chains class at Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas.
Tonight I’m speaking at a panel event for medical students at Georgetown University. Titled “The ACA and the Evolution of Our Health Care System,” the event will explore how Obamacare impacts doctors. The event is organized by the American Medical Association’s chapter on campus.
In The Wall Street Journal, Scott W. Atlas of the Hoover Institution discusses various government policies that are threatening medical innovation. He identifies Obamacare, for example, as a culprit.
A new study by Nicole Craig and Mark Craig, professors of economics at Lafayette University, estimates that the cost of federal regulations is $2 trillion. That amounts to billions of hours in compliance.
In Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, Alex Tabarok reviews a new book that provides yet another glimpse into the inner workings of our destructive regulatory state. The book, called Innovation Breakdown: How the FDA and Wall Street Cripple Medical Advances, chronicles the fight by a company called MELA Sciences to win approval from the FDA for a noninvasive method for detecting skin cancer. Initially enthusiastic about the product, the FDA later turned against the company when a new FDA director with a less favorable view of business came on board. The author of the book, who was the company’s CEO at the time (he has since retired), spent a year of his life at great personal cost fighting with the FDA before prevailing.
