Grassley-Enzi Letter to Jonathan Gruber on Transparency
As the Obama Administration admits that it needs to “open…things up more” with regard to transparency in the health care debate, Senators Grassley and Enzi sent a letter to Jonathan Gruber yesterday. You may recall that earlier this month, various media outlets discovered that Dr. Gruber had previously failed to disclose the nearly $400,000 in contracts he had obtained from HHS. Also of note, Dr. Gruber also currently serves on CBO’s Panel of Health Advisers, and was quoted in an October 19 Washington Post article as “praising the CBO…for making the best of ‘an unbelievably hard job’” in scoring health reform proposals. The fact that a paid (but undisclosed) Administration consultant was publicly quoted supporting CBO’s scoring models at a time Congress was considering health care legislation raises further questions about non-transparency and conflicts-of-interest – which the letter goes into in further detail.