The House Oversight Committee is asking embattled former ObamaCare consultant Jonathan Gruber to testify at a hearing next month on the “transparency failures” of the administration’s healthcare law.
Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) sent a letter to Gruber on Thursday, about two weeks after videos surfaced in which the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor suggested that a “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter” helped Congress pass the Affordable Care Act.
{mosads}The chairman also invited Marilyn Tavenner, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), whose own investigation found the Obama administration had inflated its enrollment numbers by about 400,000 people, helping to lift it past the much-touted 7 million goal.
“The American people deserve honesty, transparency and respect from those who forced the federal government into their healthcare,” wrote Issa in a statement Friday.
“I expect Mr. Gruber and Administrator Tavenner to testify publicly next month about the arrogance and deceptions surrounding the passage and implementation of ObamaCare,” he added.
The hearing will take place Dec. 9, the last week of the lame-duck Congress, in what would likely be the outgoing chairman’s last Oversight hearing.
When the committee’s findings on the misreported ObamaCare enrollment numbers were made public Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said the error was unintentional.
But Issa remained deeply suspicious and said in a statement: “The claim that this was only accident stretches credulity.”