The New York Times has a delicious piece about the Harvard faculty’s response to higher healthcare costs due to Obamacare. (The headline: “Health Care Fixes Backed by Harvard’s Experts Now Roil Its Faculty.” Wow.)
The story really originates in November, when the school’s faculty “overwhelmingly” voted against changes to their health plans spurred in part by the Affordable Care Act. The alterations require employees to pay more as a result of cost increases to the university in providing health insurance.
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The Times dug in further:
In Harvard’s health care enrollment guide for 2015, the university said it “must respond to the national trend of rising health care costs, including some driven by health care reform,” otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act. The guide said that Harvard faced “added costs” because of provisions in the health care law that extend coverage for children up to age 26, offer free preventive services like mammograms and colonoscopies and, starting in 2018, add a tax on high-cost insurance, known as the Cadillac tax.
Richard F. Thomas, a Harvard professor of classics and one of the world’s leading authorities on Virgil, called the changes “deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university.”
Mary D. Lewis, a professor who specializes in the history of modern France and has led opposition to the benefit changes, said they were tantamount to a pay cut. “Moreover,” she said, “this pay cut will be timed to come at precisely the moment when you are sick, stressed or facing the challenges of being a new parent.”
One of the more priceless quotes comes via a Harvard health economist:
Meredith B. Rosenthal, a professor of health economics and policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, said she was puzzled by the outcry. “The changes in Harvard faculty benefits are parallel to changes that all Americans are seeing,” she said. “Indeed, they have come to our front door much later than to others.”
