Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber, who publicly boasted about the healthcare law’s "lack of transparency" and credited the "stupidity of the American voter" with its 2010 passage, has lost a second state consulting job.
North Carolina State Auditor Beth Wood has ended a contract with the MIT economics professor,
WRAL reports.
"We can’t use you on a project where you have a bias or where people might even think you have a bias,” Bill Holmes, a spokesman for Wood, told WRAL. The auditor's office will pay Gruber $100,000 for the work he’s already done, the report added.
Gruber was hired to study the use of a managed care program in North Carolina, spending about five months analyzing data from the Department of Health and Human Services.
The decision to fire him came Monday after the state auditor’s office determined "it cannot provide appropriate safeguards to eliminate appearance of an independence impairment,” an official told WRAL.
Gruber
was also booted by Vermont, where officials said they wouldn’t pay him the full $450,000 contract, though they expected him to finish consulting work.
Gruber has pocketed nearly $480,000 as an adviser in Michigan, where legislators pledged to investigate his work there,
The Hill reported.
At a health care policy conference in October 2013, Gruber, speaking about Obamacare’s tax penalties and financing, declared: "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.
"Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically, that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass."
The videotaped remarks, which surfaced recently, set off
an immediate outcry from Republican critics who say the remarks prove the law wasn’t passed in an honest and transparent way.