Obamacare: Harvard faculty upset healthcare reform regulations will apply to them

 Chalk this story up in the deliciously ironic category: Harvard faculty, many of whom supported Obamacare, are now upset that healthcare regulations which they have been championing for years will also apply to them and cause their insurance premiums and co-pays to rise.

  Here is more:

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.

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.

The faculty vote came too late to stop the cost increases from taking effect this month, and the anger on campus remains focused on questions that are agitating many workplaces: 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?

  They have been advocating for these changes for years and now that Obamacare has been implemented  they are not willing to put their money where their mouths have been and in fact voted to reject them.

  So what are the changes which the faculty are now suddenly opposed to? Only the ones we have been told are the most popular:

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.

  And here is what some of them are saying:

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.”

  Now that these provisions will be applied to them they find them to be “deplorable” and “deeply regressive” but that is not what they were saying when they were singing the praises of Obamacare before they realized they would also have to live under the law. 

  Funny how that works, isn’t it? What a bunch of elitist hypocrites!