Harvard faculty, previously pro-Obamacare, up in arms over health cost hikes

Some of the same faculty members at Harvard who supported Obamacare are now up in arms over their new higher-priced health care plans that take effect in 2015, and they’re decrying the added costs and saying the new charges will be too burdensome to pay.

The New York Times reported: “For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.”

Faculty members had previously tried to stop any changes to their health care policies that would result in higher costs.

The New York Times reported that members of the Faculty Arts and Sciences had voted with a large majority back in November to oppose any proposed reforms to health care coverages that would bring higher costs to them, and to their fellow Harvard employees. But the vote was too late to keep the changes from going into effect.

This month, Harvard employees began feeling the health care cost hits — some of which were attributed directly to Obamacare — and expressing their anger, The New York Times reported.

Jerry Green, a professor of economics and a former provost on the Harvard faculty for more than 40 years, said expenses could now lead employees to put off getting the care they need.

“It’s equivalent to taxing the sick,” he said, The New York Times reported. “I don’t think there’s any government in the world that would tax the sick.”

And Richard Thomas, a Harvard professor of classics, said in the newspaper that the Obamacare-fueled changes to Harvard’s health care plans were “deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university.”

Yet one more professor — Mary Lewis, a specialist in the history of modern France — said the health care reform was like taking a salary cut.

“Moreover, 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,” she told The New York Times.

As Zero Hedge blog opined: “Kinda like how America worked before the tax that is Obamacare was forcefully shoved down everyone’s throat thanks to Harvard brilliant geniuses no less who decided it was time to treat the free market like their own socialist lab experiment.”