Jonathan Gruber convinced Barack Obama the individual mandate was needed in Obamacare

 You may recall during the 2008 primary campaign both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were touting their healthcare reform ideas. Mrs. Clinton’s included an individual mandate while Mr. Obama’s did not.

  In fact that was a major point of emphasis when the two debated the issue but as we all know once he got into the White House his plan changed and he determined healthcare reform needed to include the mandate after all.

  So what changed? Barack Obama met Jonathan Gruber.

    Here is what the New York Times had to say in 2012 about the role Jonathan Gruber played in crafting the individual mandate:

After Massachusetts, California came calling. So did Connecticut, Delaware, Kansas, Minnesota, Oregon, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

They all wanted Jonathan Gruber, a numbers wizard at M.I.T., to help them figure out how to fix their health care systems, just as he had helped Mitt Romney overhaul health insurance when he was the Massachusetts governor.

Then came the call in 2008 from President-elect Obama’s transition team, the one that officially turned this stay-at-home economics professor into Mr. Mandate.

Mr. Gruber has spent decades modeling the intricacies of the health care ecosystem, which involves making predictions about how new laws will play out based on past experience and economic theory. It is his research that convinced the Obama administration that health care reform could not work without requiring everyone to buy insurance.

  Of course Barack Obama is now trying to distance himself from Jonathan Gruber by basically painting him as some guy who just happened to walk in from the streets and sit down at the Obamacare table during the debate. But this shows us something quite different; the soon to be president reached out to Mr. Gruber before he was even sworn in and, as it turns out, he was responsible for convincing Barack Obama he was wrong during the campaign to oppose Hillary Clinton’s mandate.

  And now all the Democrats are trying to pretend they do not know who this guy is.