We are now up to at least six videos illustrating the smug opinions and snobbish attitudes from MIT professor and Obamacare consultant Jonathan Gruber. The fact that the number of videos keeps increasing, and keeps getting revealed piecemeal ala Breitbart and O’Keefe, is keeping this story trending and hot. The media is finally being forced to acknowledge that this story exists (though the big three dinosaurs had to be dragged into acknowledging it, and ABC only did so once six videos had been exposed), which led to Ed Henry of Fox News asking President Obama about it during a Q&A session in Brisbane, Australia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOdDFvSPZDI#t=40
Short version: Obama is trying to pull a Nancy Pelosi and claim, as he has with so many of the other scandals in his administration, that “he only just found out” about this Gruber guy and what he’s been saying, and no, he never worked for the administration and what he’s saying isn’t true anyway.

If that’s the game you want to play, Mr. President, be prepared to lose, and lose quickly.

Let’s start with the “he never worked on our staff” claim. Exactly, then, why did Professor Gruber get a $400,000 paycheck from the government, then?

Obama paid Gruber $400k on #ACA. Now WH dissmisses his role: irrelevant. Did WH overpay then, or are they lying now? http://t.co/qdspUOY6ho

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) November 16, 2014

The Washington Post article being referenced here awards a “Geppetto Checkmark” to Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) for correctly pointing out that Professor Gruber was paid right around $400K for his work for HHS in developing the Obamacare model – and HHS claimed that he was the only “qualified” person who could do this job.

In 2009, just one month after President Obama took office, the Department of Health and Human Services put out a sole-source solicitation titled “Technical Assistance in Evaluating Options for Health Reform.” The contract would be with Gruber, who the document said was the only person “reasonably available to satisfy agency requirements.”

As the agency put it, “Dr. Gruber developed a proprietary statistically sophisticated micro-simulation model that has the flexibility to ascertain the distribution of changes in health care spending and public and private sector health care costs due to a large variety of changes in health insurance benefit design, public program eligibility criteria, and tax policy.”

The model, the Gruber Microsimulation Model, is the coin of the realm, in large part because it is similar to the model used by the Congressional Budget Office. That means administration policy-makers could predict with reasonable certainty how CBO would score legislation. Given that legislation in Washington often falls or rises depending on the CBO score, that made this model a very powerful tool for administration officials.

Uh-oh. And let’s not forget that Gruber himself was forced to disclose back in 2010 that the Obama Administration HAD paid him as a consultant on Obamacare.

AFTER getting busted for undisclosed conflict http://t.co/NXuMEE8z7b Gruber disclosed this: http://t.co/we7OpSJcrL pic.twitter.com/B3CUH95OET

— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) November 16, 2014

So, if he didn’t work for you or your staff, Mr. President, shouldn’t you be arresting Professor Gruber for larceny? After all, you paid him a whole lot of money for work you claim he never did.

Next, let’s go with the assertion that the president is making – that he has no idea who Jonathan Gruber really is. This is a problem, seeing as Gruber himself admitted (as was pointed out by my fellow writer Nina) that Obama participated in discussions regarding how the CBO would be scoring Obamacare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_e00NjQvFM
And if the president is going to keep claiming that the whole process was “transparent,” then why did we have to “pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it”? If this process was so transparent, then why is Gruber bragging about how the bill was constructed in order to manipulate the numbers and allow it to be passed?

And despite the media’s attempts to hide Gruber’s role in creating Obamacare…

Wow. @politico RT @JimmyPrinceton: Same byline, and just 4 months apart. Can you spot the difference? pic.twitter.com/hMAjlt60ZR

— Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) November 16, 2014

… and Democrats getting really upset that Gruber was caught being an arrogant jerk on video multiple times…

As one who worked hard to make ACA and its benefits clear, let me say: if you looked up "stupid" in dictionary, you'd find Gruber's picture.

— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) November 16, 2014

… the hits just keep on coming.

Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber said “seniors do a terrible job choosing” their own public health care plans, according to presentation slides Gruber wrote that were obtained by The Daily Caller.

While no video of this presentation has been shown (yet), here is the pdf of Gruber’s Medicare proposal. And just notice his glowing author’s biography at the end.

President Obama, it seems that you have a problem on your hands and a lie in your mouth. But why should you behave differently than you have for any other of your administration’s scandals?

UPDATE:
Well, this is awkward. It seems President Obama needs to have a chat with Senator Obama.