◼ White House Struggles to Answer Questions About Harvard Faculty Outrage Over Obamacare
◼ Whining Harvard Professors Discover Obamacare - Megan McArdle/Bloomberg
"Deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university." That's what Harvard Classics professor Richard F. Thomas calls the changes in Harvard's health plan, which have a large number of the faculty up in arms....
The university is adopting standard features of most employer-sponsored health plans: Employees will now pay deductibles and a share of the costs, known as coinsurance, for hospitalization, surgery and certain advanced diagnostic tests. The plan has an annual deductible of $250 per individual and $750 for a family. For a doctor’s office visit, the charge is $20. For most other services, patients will pay 10 percent of the cost until they reach the out-of-pocket limit of $1,500 for an individual and $4,500 for a family.
The deepest irony is, of course, that Harvard professors helped to design Obamacare. And Obamacare is the reason that these changes are probably necessary.
The culprit is the "Cadillac Tax," the hefty excise tax on high-cost plans. The purpose of that tax is to hold down health-care costs, by making it much more expensive for employers to offer the kind of gold-plated benefit plans that shield consumers from virtually all the costs of their health-care decisions.
"Well, well, look who's stupid now..." Liberal Harvard Faculty *Loved* Obamacare…Until It Hit Them In Their Wallets http://t.co/B5T5hSYj1j
— Tammy Bruce (@HeyTammyBruce) January 6, 2015◼ Schadenfreude: Obamacare Comes Back to Bite Harvard Staff - Washington Free Beacon
Some professors–many of which were actively involved in the creation of Obamacare–are now trying to stop changes to the university’s insurance plan thanks to that very law. The controversy has pitted certain sections of the school against one another, the New York Times reported.
◼ Harvard Ideas on Health Care Hit Home, Hard - NY Times
“Harvard is a microcosm of what’s happening in health care in the country,” said David M. Cutler, a health economist at the university who was an adviser to President Obama’s 2008 campaign. But only up to a point: Professors at Harvard have until now generally avoided the higher expenses that other employers have been passing on to employees. That makes the outrage among the faculty remarkable, Mr. Cutler said, because “Harvard was and remains a very generous employer.”
