Jonathan Gruber, the economist who was a paid top adviser to the Obama administration on health care reform but didn’t disclosed the fact in media interviews at the time, continues his tradition of defending the Affordable Care Act with his special brand of half truths, distortions, extreme hyperbole and logically incoherent statements.

The real concern should be to make sure Americans don’t need to worry about whether or not they can afford to get sick; in that department, even its supporters admit the Affordable Care Act is lacking. We are going to make people buy insurance they can’t afford to use.

Although the growth of health care costs means it must remain a top political issue, we seem doomed to have our elected officials embrace destructive, regressive “solutions” that don’t fix the problem. The Republican Party, Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission, and even the Obama administration are all devotees of the economic dogma that forcing regular Americans to pay even more out-of-pocket for health care will control costs.

In honor of Steve Rattner’s revelation that Rahm Emanuel wandered around during the auto bailout saying “fuck the UAW,” I’ve renamed the “Cadillac tax” the “Fuck the UAW” tax.

This is class war, pure and simple. The rich against the poor. Hedge fund billionaires and defense contractors against senior citizens struggling to get by. Just in time to jam it through a lame duck Congress before the Christmas break, something both John Conyers and John Boehner have warned about — a repeat of what Erskine Bowles planned to do in the 90s.

I’ve said many times that it’s impossible to expect progressive members of Congress to hold together if they don’t have the backing of their natural fiscal constituencies — the liberal interest groups and the unions. Without that support, they’re left to raise money from PACS and other corporate sources to sufficiently fund their campaigns. That’s why they take turns championing progressive bills that ultimately fail so they can pretend they do something, and then voting for bad bills that ultimately pass so someone else can be the failed hero. When Tammy Baldwin votes for one PhRMA-friendly bill after another, progressives can say “hey, but she’s so good on LGBT issues!” Which never actually pass either, but the kabuki keeps activists sufficiently docile and donating to large organizations who fundraise off amping up outrage.

But it’s also worthy to note that it’s hard for them to withstand the assault of liberal “pundits” who sneeringly derided their efforts as naive, futile and “purist.” They should be proudly taking credit for their role in delegitimizing progressive opposition to the bill in liberal intellectual circles, much the same role that the same people played during the Iraq war.

It seems that President Obama’s former senior health-care adviser, David Cutler, is following in the proud tradition of Jonathan Gruber by conveniently ignoring potentially huge cost-saving ideas to make Obama’s health care proposal sound better than it really is.

Defenders of MIT economist Jonathan Gruber are still falsely claiming I accused him of tainting his analysis for pay, suggesting that I’m ignoring Gruber’s qualification for the HHS contract, while able commentators demand apologies for these claims. I don’t want apologies; what I want is independent analysis.

In a full throated mea culpa by the New York Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, appearing in the Sunday edition, the Times officially describes the critical and material implications which arise when readers are misled by undisclosed interests of sources and authors like Jonathan Gruber in their paper of record. Unfortunately, Hoyt and the Times did not have the decency to apologize to Marcy Wheeler for previously inferring otherwise.

I barely even know what Paul Krugman is arguing here. In both of his posts attacking anyone calling into question the lack of disclosure on the part of Jonathan Gruber, he acknowledges that Gruber should have disclosed his relationship. That’s really the end of the game here. Nobody is really saying that Gruber didn’t come to his conclusions honestly (though I’ll return to this in a moment) or isn’t saying now what he wouldn’t have said if he was not under contract. The problem is that the White House repeatedly used Gruber as an “objective source” while he was under contract, and neither the White House nor Gruber bothered to disclose that fact for months.