Financial services company Sun Life is again hosting its Wake Up Summit. Its last webinar explored the effect of Obamacare on the nation, and Jonathan Gruber, MIT economist and Obamacare architect, was a speaker in the keynote address and a contributor to one panel discussion (registration required to view).
The conference could have been described as boringly collegial.
This year’s webinar occurs on April Fools’ Day and may prove more provocative. Wake Up Summit 2015 will again feature Jonathan Gruber, but this time alongside Michael Cannon, the Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies and, with legal scholar Jonathan Adler, one of the masterminds of the so-called Obamacare “subsidies cases.” The informed reader will recall King v. Burwell as the case most recently heard at the Supreme Court.
If you’re free at 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, you can register to watch it live here. Click the RSVP button on the right side of the page.
You can also make the event more lively. Sun Life is inviting questions before the event.
You may have a variety of questions of your own for Mr. Gruber. But you could also pose questions like these, for either participant:
1. Everyone’s heard that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” Would you please explain how the ACA affects those who receive health insurance from their employers?”
2. When Senator Obama ran for office he promised not to eliminate the tax exclusion for job-based insurance. But doesn’t the Cadillac Tax achieve the same goal over an extended time frame?
3. Don’t you think the Cadillac Tax is mislabeled since it appears to eventually impact most if not all job-based plans?
4. Why does the Cadillac Tax cap grow at CPI or CPI +1? Won’t that assure that most if not all plans become Cadillac Tax plans?
5. What do you think of S&P Capitals’ recent prediction that by 2020 90% of those with job-based coverage will be shifted to the ACA exchanges?
6. Do you agree with Medicare chief actuary Richard Foster’s prediction that “essentially all Americans” will over time get their private coverage through ACA exchanges?
7. Exactly how does the ACA cause “wage growth” for workers?
8. The CBO scores the ACA as improving the deficit more in the out years than in the first ten years. Why is that?
9. Do you think the ACA is more like Romneycare or Hillarycare?
10. If states do not establish their own exchanges, what role do states really have with regard to the ACA?
11. Is a “single payer“ health system more likely if the ACA fails or if the ACA succeeds?
Of course, you’re also free to ask not-so-serious questions of either Mr. Gruber or Mr. Cannon, questions like these:
1. Why aren’t you, Mr. Gruber, still hiding under a rock?
2. Are you, Mr. Gruber, capable of feeling shame?
3. Mr. Gruber, would you like to clarify your “falling off a building” prediction for workers losing job-based insurance?
4. Mr. Gruber, why were your Obamacare models so wrong?
5. Have you, Mr. Gruber, apologized to your family for publicly humiliating them?
6. Has MIT placed any sanctions on you, Mr. Gruber, given your damaging effects on its reputation?
7. Mr. Gruber, when will you turn over your “research assistants’” records?
8. Mr. Cannon, how did you become so flipping awesome?
Feel free to offer your questions in the comments section below. But it’s far more important that you send them to Sun Life.
Of course, as Mr. Cannon points out, Mr. Gruber may not show up at all.
Exposing Obamacare 