Assistants…assistance…what’s in a word?

Seems the Obamacare guru, MIT professor Gruber, is in hot water for overbilling.

Contracted by Vermont for impact projections on single-payer systems, Gruber was charging “…$500 an hour for his work and $100 for his research assistants.”

But it appears he only had one assistant. And it just could be his ‘stupid taxpayer’ rhetoric caused more scrutiny than he expected.

Going through billing documents, it appears some irregularities were noticed by those doing the audit, including how many assistants he had (versus billed for).

Seems Gruber billed 100 hours of his time, and 500 hours of time for his assistants.

But as noted previously, he only had one assistant – the number of hours he billed for ‘assistants’ (1000) would have meant one assistant worked 100 hrs/week.

On the hot-seat now, he hasn’t yet responded to those ‘inquiries’. If it were a blue-collar type guy, he could always claim he just misspelled ‘assistance’.

(But, that would somewhat tarnish a brilliant MIT professor’s credentials.)