The Health Care Follies Continue

Who's Jonathan Gruber? He's a respected MIT professor, and a widely cited health-care economist. He recently penned a Washington Post op-ed defending some of the key components of the healthcare proposals pushed for by the Obama Administration and passed by Congress.

And he's been getting paid, with taxpayer dollars.

I tend to agree with Megan McArdle that this is more of a disclosure and perception issue than a real problem -- Gruber's certainly not writing something he doesn't believe. But it does leave us to wonder why one of the more influential voices in favor of Obamacare didn't reveal this potential conflict earlier on, and McArdle notes the impact...

I certainly would not have written about him the same way, even though I am sure that what Gruber is saying comports with what he believes. My guess is that like me, most journalists would have treated him as an employee of the administration, with all the constraints that implies, rather than passing along his pronouncements as the thoughts of an independent academic. Christina Romer is a very, very fine economist. But her statements about administration policy are treated differently from statements by, say, her colleague Brad De Long.

Given how influential Professor Gruber's work has been during the health care debate, that's rather a large problem.

Gruber's explanation that "he disclosed this to reporters whenever they asked" is not very compelling. I don't see how anyone even tangentially connected to policy work could fail to realize that this was a material conflict of interest that should have been disclosed, and reporters cannot take up all their interview time going through all the sources who might have been paying or otherwise influencing their interviewee.

The standard is even higher for people who are taking public funds, and not only Professor Gruber, but the administration had a responsibility to disclose the relationship. Yet a post on the OMB blog signed by Peter Orszag cited Brownstein's Gruber quotes without mentioning the relationship.

I think the real problem here is one for the Obama Administration, which has been struggling with reporters recently because of trust issues.

Allow me to illustrate by way of analogy. My daughter is two years old, and a total Daddy's girl. She trusts her Daddy on anything and everything (which will make it all the more painful come the inevitable day when she tells me she hates me, which happens to all parents). But she hates getting water in her eyes when she gets a bath, which makes it more difficult to wash her hair. Her mother is pretty good at keeping the water from getting into her eyes; her Daddy, not so good. Hence, when she gets a bath from her father, there's a lecture session where she tells me "Don't get it in my eyes!" at least three times. And because my track record isn't good, she's not inclined to trust me on this one when I ask.

Similarly, most journalists were and are predisposed to treat the Obama team well, not just because they're ideologically aligned but because they're in power. But trust, once lost, can be very difficult to regain, even from people who want to give you the benefit of the doubt. I think the press is already following one of the mantras of Reagan when it comes to dealing with the administration: Trust, but verify. For the sake of the administration, the relationship needs that -- Obama as a candidate did not get nearly enough vetting by the press, and his team came to expect kid gloves treatment. The harsher questions being asked will be good for them. The only real issue is whether they'll have answers.