Hope that you don’t have an allergy to schadenfreude, because this is the pure stuff: ” 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.” Turns out that adding mandatory procedures and extra coverage costs money; so does the ‘Cadillac tax’ on high-end plans like Harvard’s. So Harvard went and passed those extra costs to policy holders – like everybody else did – and said policy holders are, well, freaking out.
Seriously: to quote Oscar Wilde’s famous witticism, you would need to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the way Harvard professors are reacting to the news that they now have deductables and out-of-pocket limits and co-pays and all the rest of it. And it just gets funnier and funnier, the farther down you get. I personally lost it when I read this bit (bolding mine) : “Some Harvard employees have said they will gladly accept a narrower network of health care providers if it lowers their costs. But Harvard’s ability to create such networks is complicated by the fact that some of Boston’s best-known, most expensive hospitals are affiliated with Harvard Medical School. To create a network of high-value providers, Harvard would probably need to exclude some of its own teaching hospitals, or discourage their use.” It’s the consternation at it all. It’s like Harvard academics thought that there was a line, and they were on the right side of that line, and it was just the people that they didn’t care for who would have to deal with any minor consequences arising from the adoption of Obamacare. Well, guess what? Turns out that we’re all just Bozos on this bus… and that includes the Bozos over at Harvard University. Continue reading Harvard bitten by the Obamacare monster it helped spawn.