Congress Republicans will use Jonathan Gruber's comments to taunt administration witnesses. Health Care GOP preps new attack plan for Obamacare The new majority has been itching to investigate everything they can about a law they hate.

The Republican Congress is getting ready to ramp up the Obamacare hearings, firing up enough investigations to keep Obama administration officials visiting hearing rooms on both sides of the Capitol for the next two years.

They’ll shine the spotlight on everything from cable-friendly scandals to tried-and-true complaints about the law’s side effects. They’re going to investigate premium increases for individuals and small businesses, the impact on the federal deficit, payments to insurance companies that attract too many sick people, and the threat of huge tax headaches for some Obamacare customers next spring.


They’ll be watching closely as the new enrollment season for the health care law begins on Saturday, although they’ll only jump in with hearings if there’s another disaster. And yes, Republicans are going to have a lot of fun with Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist and consultant on the law who has been saying what every Obamacare hater wants to hear: that the law was filled with trickery so it could pass Congress.

( Also on POLITICO: New Obamacare furor: Was Jonathan Gruber the “architect”?)

They’re probably not going to drag Gruber up to the Hill to testify, but they will use his comments to taunt administration witnesses and suggest that the law wasn’t passed in an honest, transparent way.

It’s all happening because the new Senate Republican majority has been itching to do what only the House has been able to do for the past four years: investigate everything they can about a law they hate, but can’t repeal.

“I want to get facts and figures, and that’s really what I want to use the committee for – give the American people the truth,” said Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a vocal Obamacare critic who’s the likely new chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the main oversight panel in the Senate.

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Obama administration officials say they’re not too worried. They say the Department of Health and Human Services has already fine-tuned its procedures for prepping for hearings and responding to information requests. Earlier this year, it brought in a seasoned investigator — Laura Stuber, a former aide to Democratic Sen. Carl Levin on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations — to coordinate the administration’s responses to Hill oversight efforts on the health care law.

Gruber has been saying Obamacare was filled with trickery so it could pass Congress. | AP Photo

But the administration has also gotten used to Obamacare oversight. They’ve already been through a round of grueling hearings during the disastrous enrollment launch last fall. And they think the fury over Gruber’s comments will die down somewhat before the new hearings start next year. Unless there’s some new disaster, they don’t think there’s a lot of new dirt that the Republicans can dig up.

Still, it’s one thing to have the House whacking away at Obamacare on its own, and another when they’re joined by Senate panels like the Finance, Budget and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committees, which can add more investigative firepower than House hearings usually have.

Orrin Hatch, the likely new Finance Committee chairman, said the new Senate majority will give Republicans “a real opportunity to drive a smart and robust oversight agenda that will expose the flaws of the President’s health law and help develop common-sense solutions to improve health care coverage for the American people.”

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And Lamar Alexander, who’s expected to head the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, suggested that the hearings will help Republicans try to fix the law’s problems until they can repeal it: “Until we have a president in the White House who’s willing to sign a repeal bill, Democrats should work with us to repair the damage Obamacare has done.”

There’s no master plan for Obamacare oversight, but the leaderships in both the House and the Senate are definitely keeping tabs on the committees’ investigative topics. During the summer, incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell met with the ranking members of all of the committees and asked them to start planning for aggressive oversight if Republicans won the majority — including Obamacare.

Kevin McCarthy's director of oversight will coordinate the agendas on health care law. | AP Photo

And on the House side, Rob Borden, director of oversight for Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, will coordinate the committees’ investigative agendas on the health care law, as he does for other issues. There probably won’t be a lot of topics that are off limits: Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said the House will have ”an ‘all of the above’ approach” to Obamacare oversight.

The hearings will probably range from the wonky and technical, like the workings of the “risk corridor” payments to cover insurance company losses, to timely, cable-news-friendly topics like the Gruber comments, in which he declared that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” that helped the law pass Congress.

( Also on POLITICO: Warren to the rescue)

Johnson said it was “way too early” to say whether he’d actually call Gruber to testify, but he said the economist’s comments “highlight the deception” that he claims has been behind Obamacare all along: “For an administration that promised to be the most transparent administration in history, look at what’s happening with Jonathan Gruber.”

Republican aides say it’s highly unlikely that they’d try to put him on the witness stand, but administration officials are already on the defensive, with White House press secretary Josh Earnest insisting Thursday that the congressional debate and passage of the law was “extraordinarily transparent.” (Gruber declined to comment.)

The HELP Committee is likely to hold a hearing on the causes of rising premiums for individuals and small businesses, which Republicans suspect are being driven by factors like new minimum benefits and a provision of the law that prevents older customers from paying more than three times as much as younger ones, according to a committee aide.

The Finance Committee would probably take a close look at the law’s subsidies — especially if a lot of consumers discover that they received bigger tax credit payments than they deserved, based on their income. If that happens, they’d have to refund the overpayments when they file their taxes this spring, which could prompt a new round of headlines about angry customers.

Other issues on the Finance agenda could include the various taxes that help pay for the law and their costs to consumers, how well the Medicaid expansion is actually working, and what happened to the federal planning funds HHS sent to states that didn’t create their own health insurance exchanges, according to a committee aide.

On the Senate Budget Committee, Jeff Sessions — who’s in line to become the new chairman, but faces a possible challenge from Mike Enzi — wants to focus on the law’s impact on the deficit. He’s likely to get a lot of mileage out of a Budget Committee Republican staff analysis last month that concluded the law will increase the budget deficit by $131 billion over 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office has said the opposite — that the law will reduce the deficit — but it hasn’t updated its estimates since 2012, and the GOP analysis concluded that a lot has changed since then.

And in the House, the Energy and Commerce Committee will look at the premiums and subsidies as well, with a special focus on whether the federal health insurance exchange — which covers 36 states — did enough to make sure that customers were actually eligible for subsidies.

The law says customers can only get subsidies if they don’t have an “affordable offer” of health coverage from their employer, with a complicated definition of what’s considered affordable. But Republican investigators are raising questions about whether there was a system to check that information in the federal marketplace. If there wasn’t, they say there could be a lot of customers who never should have gotten subsidies in the first place.

The Obama administration says the system does check with some sources, like official employment coverage data, but it also relies on customers to give honest answers on their applications. “We believe that consumers have the most up to date information on their personal situation and are required to fill out the application truthfully,” said Aaron Albright, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “If their answers on the application indicate they have access to affordable, minimum value employer coverage, the system will not allow them to receive these tax credits.

Other Energy and Commerce topics are likely to include the “risk corridors” payments — which could face a new challenge, since Chairman Fred Upton and other Republicans argue that the Obama administration doesn’t have the authority to make the payments.

We’ve seen this movie before.”

There are likely to be many more House hearings, but the agenda is in flux due to the turnover in committee chairmanships. Paul Ryan is likely to become the new Ways and Means chairman and Tom Price is expected to replace him as Budget Committee chairman, but neither will talk about their Obamacare oversight priorities until that happens. And there’s a heated race to replace Darrell Issa as the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, but the front-runners — Jason Chaffetz of Utah and Mike Turner of Ohio — declined to discuss their Obamacare plans.

In some ways, the timing of the ramped-up hearings might be a bit of a surprise, given that the health care law isn’t in the middle of a meltdown like last year’s website launch or the canceled health plans. But now that the Republicans have won the Senate, they’ll have the ability to double their efforts to investigate the many other problems they see with the law — and they intend to use it.

Holtz-Eakin used to serve as John McCain's chief economic adviser. | AP Photo

“They’ll have an automatic echo chamber. They can hold two of everything,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the conservative American Action Forum. And the hearings can lead directly to riders on appropriations bills, he said, since Senate and House Republicans will be able to use the spending bills to try to restrict parts of the health care law they don’t like.

But even Holtz-Eakin, a critic of the law, doesn’t see a lot of new topics the Republicans can bring up, given all of the hearings the House has already held.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” he said.