As one of Obamacare’s architects was grilled by congressmen last week after video surfaced of him saying Democrats had to lie about the health care law to get it passed, he was also challenged on his position in favor of abortion.
MIT economics Professor Jonathan Gruber claimed he has “no philosophy of abortion” as Rep. Thomas Massie, R-KY, questioned him on a paper he wrote in 1997 arguing that there are social benefits to aborting poor children.
Quoting parts of the paper, Massie reminded Gruber that the economist had said abortion legalization, and specifically the expanded abortions of “marginal” children, led to $14 billion in welfare savings through 1994.
“On Page 20, you conclude that abortion legalization appears to be associated with an improvement in the average living circumstances in birth outcomes among a birth cohort,” said Massie. The congressman then asked if “providing more access to abortion — is that a worthy social outcome to achieve cost savings for the government?”
In response, Gruber — who has been under intense bipartisan pressure since his comments went public — said “that is not what my paper was about. It was not a philosophical paper. It was about empirical facts.”
“What did you mean by 'positive selection'?” cut in Massie. He noted that the paper says that expanded abortion could lead to “steady state savings of $1.6 billion per year from positive selection.”
When Gruber tried to explain the paper, Massie doubled down, asking what the MIT economist had meant by “positive selection.” Gruber said he had examined the “characteristics” of children pre-Roe vs. Wade and afterwards, which led Massie to remark that “what you inferred, I find chilling.”
“What you inferred is that if we reduce the number of children born, life will be better for the rest of us still living. Specifically, you seem to suggest that if we eliminate or reduce the number of poor people that are born, this will make life better for all Americans.”
This led Massie to his final question, about Gruber's beliefs on “end-of-life care.” Massie said that his constituents are worried about the rationing potential of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). IPAB, which was created under the ACA, is a board of 15 unelected individuals who would decide how to use Medicare dollars in a cost-effective manner if costs do not slow enough.
“If there are fewer elderly people, particularly poor elderly people, wouldn't that save a ton of money, too?” asked Massie. “And do you understand the dangerous implications of going down this path?”
According to Gruber, “I have no philosophy of abortion. I have no philosophy of end-of-life care. My job as an economist is to deliver the empirical facts so that you all [Congress and policymakers] can make the necessary decisions.”
Massie interrupted, asking, “What would your facts be, on the elderly?” and demanding to know whether, “as an economist,” Gruber knew if end-of-life care “does…save money.”
“I do not advocate that the federal government should ration end-of-life care,” said Gruber.
Gruber's work for the ACA and on the alleged social benefits have faced severe criticism since they were publicized. Gruber's abortion work, however, had already been favorably referenced in a 2001 paper co-authored by the one of the authors of the book Freakonomics.
In Freakonomics, Steven Levitt argued that abortion leads to lower crime. It was based upon Levitt's 2001 paper on the subject, which was found to have data errors and other flaws, which in turn favorably cited Gruber's final 1999 paper as “most similar to ours, [which] document[s] that the early life circumstances of those children on the margin of abortion are difficult along many dimensions: infant mortality, growing up in a single-parent family, and experiencing poverty.”