Originally published January 19 2015
Harvard professors who helped construct Obamacare are furious that they're not exempt
by Daniel Barker
(NaturalNews) Oh, the irony...
There's no clearer indictment of the kind of thinking that was responsible for the creation of Obamacare in the first place -- and the problems associated with its implementation in the real world -- than the recent flap that was engendered when Harvard professors realized that they are not exempt from the changes in their health plans that the Affordable Care Act helped bring about.
The irony is contained in the fact that Harvard is one of the institutions that was largely responsible for drafting and endorsing the Obamacare model. But now that the ivory tower profs are being forced to have a taste of their own medicine (pun intended), they -- like most Americans -- are now claiming that the flavor is somewhat bitter.
Robert Pear of The New York Times explains:
Members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the heart of the 378-year-old university, voted overwhelmingly in November to oppose changes that would require them and thousands of other Harvard employees to pay more for health care. The university says the increases are in part a result of the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act, which many Harvard professors championed.
As it turns out, the vote to block the changes occurred too late to stop the cost hike, but the debate among the Harvard faculty and staff rages on and is centered around the same questions that the rest of America is asking.
As Pear puts it:
How should the burden of health costs be shared by employers and employees? If employees have to bear more of the cost, will they skimp on medically necessary care, curtail the use of less valuable services, or both?
But the irony doesn't stop there. Harvard's health plan (by anyone's standards, even after the cost increases) is very generous, requiring participants to pay an annual deductible of $250 for individuals and $750 for families. Visits to the doctor's office cost $20, and patients pay 10 percent of the cost of most other services "until they reach the out-of-pocket limit of $1,500 for an individual and $4,500 for a family," according to Pear.
And so, it's difficult to imagine that the highly paid academics who helped foist Obamacare on the rest of the populace are going to receive much sympathy from the average American who has seen the cost of healthcare rise substantially without a corresponding increase in income.
It's also difficult to see the plight of the Harvard academics as being a "microcosm" of the problems associated with the changes in healthcare costs in America, as some have suggested.
Although the fundamental economic principles are the same, it seems unfair to the rest of the country's working poor to be compared with these elitist morons who not only have been minimally affected but are largely responsible for the rollout of the disastrous monstrosity known as Obamacare to begin with.
It would almost be funny, if it weren't so serious.
The reality now faced by the average American family is one of higher healthcare costs, higher taxes due to the distribution of the burden across the board and dwindling job opportunities, because employers can no longer afford to share the cost of insuring their full-time employees.
With Obamacare, everybody loses. The cost of the Affordable Care Act will reach into the trillions of dollars over the next decade as the overall quality of medical care declines.
And those poor, mistreated Harvard professors will continue to reap the benefits of living in their ivory towers without even sensing the irony or the truth that they are, as ZeroHedge.com puts it: "as stupid as the average American voter."
Sources:
http://www.zerohedge.com
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www.bloombergview.com
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