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Obamacare Architects At Harvard Furious After Learning They Are Not Exempt From Obamacare
The brain incubator at Harvard, the place which according to legend, and certainly the US News and World Report's annual paid college infomercial, is the repository for some of the smartest people in the world, is furious.
The reason - Harvard's illustrious faculty has learned that they too will be subject to their own policy recommendations as relates to Obamacare, which they themselves helped conceive. As the left-leaning NYT reported earlier today, "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."
Because Harvard's brilliant ivory tower economists and public policy wonks know precisely how to fix the world... as long as said fix never applies to them.
And sure enough, the faculty did everything in its power to make sure it never had to suffer the consequences of its own brilliance...
"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."
... But it was too late:
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?
And it just gets better:
“Harvard is a microcosm of what’s happening in health care in the country,” said David M. Cutler, a health economist at the university who was an adviser to President Obama’s 2008 campaign. But only up to a point: Professors at Harvard have until now generally avoided the higher expenses that other employers have been passing on to employees. That makes the outrage among the faculty remarkable, Mr. Cutler said, because “Harvard was and remains a very generous employer.”
Ah, hypocrisy: exactly the same whether it is at the lowliest of community colleges or the leading bastion of liberal thought.
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.
The faculty is enraged, ENRAGED that what it hoped would only apply to the plebian peasantry is just as applicable to the self-appointed smartest people in the world. Here's Dick:
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.”
And here's Mary:
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.”
Why the anger? Because Harvard thought that it would be, drumroll, exempt from the Affordable Care Act which it was instrumental in conceiving :
The university is adopting standard features of most employer-sponsored health plans: Employees will now pay deductibles and a share of the costs, known as coinsurance, for hospitalization, surgery and certain advanced diagnostic tests. The plan has an annual deductible of $250 per individual and $750 for a family. For a doctor’s office visit, the charge is $20. For most other services, patients will pay 10 percent of the cost until they reach the out-of-pocket limit of $1,500 for an individual and $4,500 for a family.
Continue reading the main story
Previously, Harvard employees paid a portion of insurance premiums and had low out-of-pocket costs when they received care.
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. But hey, at least it helped "boost" Q1 Q3 GDP by 1%.
It has gotten so bad that Harvard, realizing it is not exempt for socialist utopia, is suffering from "distress" and "anxiety."
The president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, acknowledged in a letter to the faculty that the changes in health benefits — though based on recommendations from some of the university’s own health policy experts — were “causing distress” and had “generated anxiety” on campus. But she said the changes were necessary because Harvard’s health benefit costs were growing faster than operating revenues or staff salaries and were threatening the budget for other priorities like teaching, research and student aid.
In response, Harvard professors, including mathematicians and microeconomists, have dissected the university’s data and question whether its health costs have been growing as fast as the university says. Some created spreadsheets and contended that the university’s arguments about the growth of employee health costs were misleading. In recent years, national health spending has been growing at an exceptionally slow rate.
We also learn that the only reason why it was called "Affordable Care" is because, apparently, it was unaffordable.
some ideas that looked good to academia in theory are now causing consternation. In 2009, while Congress was considering the health care legislation, Dr. Alan M. Garber — then a Stanford professor and now the provost of Harvard — led a group of economists who sent an open letter to Mr. Obama endorsing cost-control features of the bill. They praised the Cadillac tax as a way to rein in health costs and premiums.
Dr. Garber, a physician and health economist, has been at the center of the current Harvard debate. He approved the changes in benefits, which were recommended by a committee that included university administrators and experts on health policy.
In an interview, Dr. Garber acknowledged that Harvard employees would face greater cost-sharing, but he defended the changes. “Cost-sharing, if done appropriately, can slow the growth of health spending,” he said. “We need to be prepared for the very real possibility that health expenditure growth will take off again.”
But Jerry R. Green, a professor of economics and a former provost who has been on the Harvard faculty for more than four decades, said the new out-of-pocket costs could lead people to defer medical care or diagnostic tests, causing more serious illnesses and costly complications in the future.
“It’s equivalent to taxing the sick,” Professor Green said. “I don’t think there’s any government in the world that would tax the sick.”
But in her view, there are drawbacks to the Harvard plan and others like it that require consumers to pay a share of health care costs at the time of service. “Consumer cost-sharing is a blunt instrument,” Professor Rosenthal said. “It will save money, but we have strong evidence that when faced with high out-of-pocket costs, consumers make choices that do not appear to be in their best interests in terms of health.”
If you aren't crying with laughter yet, you will now once the sheer idiocy of central planning, even when conceived by the world's smartest people, is unveiled:
Harvard’s new plan is far more generous than plans sold on public insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act. Harvard says its plan pays 91 percent of the cost of care for a typical consumer, while the most popular plans on the exchanges, known as silver plans, pay 70 percent, on average.
In many states, consumers have complained about health plans that limit their choice of doctors and hospitals. 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.
“Harvard employees want access to everything,” said Dr. Barbara J. McNeil, the head of the health care policy department at Harvard Medical School and a member of the benefits committee. “They don’t want to be restricted in what institutions they can get care from.”
In other words, compared to the rest of the socialist experiment they helped conceive, Harvard has it much, much better. "Although out-of-pocket costs over all for a typical Harvard employee are to increase in 2015, administrators said premiums would decline slightly. They noted that the university, which has an endowment valued at more than $36 billion, had an unusual program to provide protection against high out-of-pocket costs for employees earning $95,000 a year or less. Still, professors said the protections did not offset the new financial burdens that would fall on junior faculty and lower-paid staff members."
But the punchline comes from none other than a sociologist:
“It seems that Harvard is trying to save money by shifting costs to sick people,” said Mary C. Waters, a professor of sociology. “I don’t understand why a university with Harvard’s incredible resources would do this. What is the crisis?”
Indeed: how dare a university with such "incredible resources" be forced to comply with the policy it itself helped create?
Of course, none of the above is the issue at hand: what is really pissing Harvard off, is that as its perennial next door competitor MIT, as expressed by one professor Jonathan Gruber, made it quite clear that only a nation as stupid as America would allow such as an opaque law as Obamacare to be passed. And, by implication, Harvard being subject to this law, makes its faculty about as stupid as the average American voter. And there is nothing more crushing, "distressing" and "anxiety-provoking" for a bunch of wealthy, ivory tower dwellers than seeing their own egos go down in flames.
Or, said otherwise: MIT 1 - Harvard 0.
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"Mary D. Lewis, a professor who specializes in the history of modern France..."
Seriously, who the hell dedicates their life's work to studying the history of modern France? In the past 100 years, what have the French offered the world? Women with hairy armpits and legs? French fries? French ticklers? Some ignorant youth paid >$50,000/year to learn that the ribs are for her pleasure or that Jacques Cousteau liked diving. No offense to Jacques, he was a great man. He accomplished more in his life that this Harvard hag could ever dream of doing. At least now they are getting a taste of their own ACA medicine.
You forgot the secondary French flag: a white cross on a white background.
Ol' Jacques spent WWII pioneering SCUBA development in the South of France.
Sure beats fighting the enemy, I guess. Tough work, too.
sweet irony
I listened to a free radio programming and bought three books that cost me less than $100. It took me 2 months to read those books and to do some serious rereading and analysis. I also went on the internet as searched government stats both in the US and Europe. This in total took me about 4 months and you know what?
I came to the conclusion that obamacare was unaffordable, it's socialized medicine, and socialized medicine doesn't achieve the goals of providing healthcare for the people. It's about contro.
It didn't take me 4 yrs and $200K in student loans to figure out that shit doesn't work.
Time to rethink the idea of higher education.
This is SO fucking awesome! The Harvard Mafia finally has to eat its own shit. Priceless!
Damn it the list keeps getting longer we'll be hunting down all these bastards for generations I was hoping to get it done in a few short yesrs tops.
Yeah target acquisition is gonna take a lot longer than I thought.
That's ok though, still worth it.
Those profs at Harvard Schmarvard don't take kindly to eating crow and humble pie.
They found out the hard way that the ACA is a piece of shit legislation.
Must be because they're dumber than posts, the dumbasses.
How do you like them apples?
Spoliation by Law by Frederic Bastiat, from Sophism of the Protectionists
bichez
Regarding Obamacare:
I am a CPA and just today I downloaded the first version of my PRO Tax preparation software. Playing around with it, started entering information for my personal 2014 tax return.
On Form 1040, Line 61 the IRS is calling the Obamacare tax “Health Care: individual responsibility (see instructions)”
Then there is Form 8965, Health Care Exemptions. Where you can get out of the penalty. What a mess that form is.
I have a Hardship Exemption. Since my individual health care plan was cancelled because of Obamacare.
Well, as I discovered, to qualify for this exemption, I need an “Exemption Certificate Number.” Which, from IRS.gov I need to get from another site, this link:
https://marketplace.cms.gov/getofficialresources/publications-and-articles/hardship-exemption.pdf
Click on that, File Not Found. Another broken web site.
But I dug around, found the form. And it is something I have to fill in and snail mail in to get my “Exemption Certificate Number.”
My point? This is a nightmare. I will send the form in because I am a CPA; the average taxpayer will not.
This “law” is just unworkable.
How did we get to this pathetic point ….
I wonder how long it will take them to send you your "exemption certificate number."
I have a feeling you will end up needing to file for an extension because it will take them so long, even though you are starting as early as possible. Maybe they don't even actually have anyone hired on, to provide the numbers when the forms come in; who knows?
This sounds totally awful.
You people are enjoying this WAY to much!
I think the word you're looking for is "schadenfreude".
Scooden-fruity...Scoooooden-frooooooty!
No......it's called arrogant fucking liberals getting EXACTLY what they deserve.
THE poison ivy league Harvardians have been hoisted by their own retards.
Deleted
Regarding Obamacare:
I am a CPA and just today I downloaded the first version of my PRO Tax preparation software. Playing around with it, started entering information for my personal 2014 tax return.
On Form 1040, Line 61 the IRS is calling the Obamacare tax “Health Care: individual responsibility (see instructions)”
Then there is Form 8965, Health Care Exemptions. Where you can get out of the penalty. What a mess that form is.
I have a Hardship Exemption. Since my individual health care plan was cancelled because of Obamacare.
Well, as I discovered, to qualify for this exemption, I need an “Exemption Certificate Number.” Which, from IRS.gov I need to get from another site, this link:
https://marketplace.cms.gov/getofficialresources/publications-and-articles/hardship-exemption.pdf
Click on that, File Not Found. Another broken web site.
But I dug around, found the form. And it is something I have to fill in and snail mail in to get my “Exemption Certificate Number.”
My point? This is a nightmare. I will send the form in because I am a CPA; the average taxpayer will not.
This “law” is just unworkable.
How did we get to this pathetic point ….
>How did we get to this pathetic point ….
The tree of liberty was not refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants?
Piss off Harvard. We have told you 5 years ago.
Krugman vs. Krugman on Carbon Taxes
The stupid fucking unions voted for a cadillac tax on their own asses. They demanded it, paid their dues to liberal politicians.....and proceeded to fuck themselves.
The young ain't too happy either now that they done got Gubered.
Oh well.
The people have spoken.
They now must be punished.
Huh? Why would you want to exempt from something that's supposed to be so good for you? Wonder why?
Love me some edumakation but these 'professional schools' are out of control. The shit you need for a degree in anything is ridiculous. A Phys-ed class for everything? Really? I had to take one for nursing, and ended up taking "Walking for Wellness", which consisted of the class walking along predetermined routes throughout the neighborhood. Yes, I had to PAY for a class so I could walk around my OWN FUCKING NEIGHBORHOOD!
And the teacher was a bitch too, telling us all she'd best not catch us stopping for coffee along our route...Really? I need THIS to work in the field? AND pay for it?
Book smart - street ignorant, "big feeling" motherfuckers.
Someone should tell these guys to go eat a bag of dicks
I would recommend they pay, because when TSHF, and you go out on to the 99%ers. streets, your diploma, and your attitude will not help you.
2018 the real Obamacare rape begins, these increases are warm ups, wait till they actually have to hire real doctors and hospitals and nurses and deliver care to the poor non-paying mob they promised.
Title translation:
Know-it-all cunts outsmart themselves.
Left leaning NYT? OK, LISTEN UP MAGGOTS! THERE IS NO "LEFT" IN THE PART OF THE EMPIRE FORMERLY KNOWN AS THE U. S. A.
What happened to the Vice-President....I remember his name is Joe Biden....he is always good for a laugh when he speaks. What does he "think" about this?
Socialized healthcare quickly transforms into a unionized, overpriced, out of control system that drains taxpayers.
Orwell would have been proud - that his works apply so well today.
Orwell would be shocked. He wrote the fucking book, people read it, and still followed their leaders into slavery.
How many grand schools will die out in the collapse?
This article is rich with humor. "Drew Gulpin Faust"? Why do rich people always give their daughters men's names? And can we now say that Harvard's president has struck a Faustian agreement with our government?
I definitely would have refrained from using the unfortunate and unnecessary addendum of
'Gulpin'.
Her adolescence must have been an absolute Hell.
I almost forgot: Fuck You Harvard!
"..... the Class V III transaction closed on Feb. 28, 2007. One experienced CDO trader characterized the Class V III portfolio in an e-mail as “dogsh!t” and “possibly the best short EVER!” An experienced collateral manager commented that “the portfolio is horrible.”"
Reminds me of another episode of brilliance in the history of our great nation.
Look what they want to do to you if you DON'T buy obamacare:
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=153583
Granted that's a few years old but if they had their way a lot of us would be in jail.
Here's an idea Pelosi........why don't you just put a huge fence around the perimeter of the US and take you stupid fucking cunt disorderment ass and go to some place you'll be right at home. Like China.
they cry almost as much as the congress staff did when they were forced on ACA, oh wait, they were given subsidy payments to cover it or were exempted..never mind.
still am confused by our leftist posters who never get up in arms when .gov exempts itself from laws and regs that are good for the rest of us- just not those who claim to have voted the plans into law..of course over 5000 exemptions and counting for this law, Unions being exempted, friends of obuma, why it's all most like a monarchy in ol DC, can't be, but more .gov will fix it ..tsa will soon be running healthcare, we all love tsa agents they are swell.
Harvard Yale......Elite scum
Yale Receives $10 million…Harvard Got $15 Million Both Chinese Donors
China Elite Taught Global View in $103,000-a-Year Swiss Schools
World’s Wealthy Elite Attend Blue-chip U.S. Schools
Globalist Jay Rockefeller Gets His Own School of Policy and Politics at WVU
http://newworldorderg20.wordpress.com
What a great example of why you are wasting your time and money sending your kids to college in the US.
When the collapse comes we.need.to round these people up and make them choose which of their group gets beaten to death first, then second, then third....
It's a sin to waste food.
The South was right!
Arrogant bastards. They should pay triple. Screw you, Harvard ratbags.
The problem with these Harvard people is that making $100-$200k a year in the villages they live in puts them in the "middle class' because the cost of living is high and the number of educated people with good jobs is high. They don't realize they are rich because federal legislation doesn't take into account cost of living. They rail against the rich and say the rich are going to pay for this and that. They consider rich people to be the CEOs making $750k and up. There are arrogant. Obama and company has been saying things like "We are going to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires so rates will be increased for anyone making over $200k a year." They keep missing the $200k threshold and go with the yay screw millionaires and billionaires.
$750 deductible for a family and 10% co-insurance? Wow, to be so lucky! I think at mainstream corps it's $4,000-$5,000 for the deductible and 20% co-insurance. No more yearly family vacations with deductibles like that, and that's been for a few years now.
most of these Harvard MBA types don’t add up to
dog shit. ....
True story. I live in South America. We pay about $80 a month for full medical coverage. A friend's wife almost died of alcoholism. She was in the hospital for 3 weeks. They may give her a new liver. His cost? $14.00. Why is medical care so ridiculously expensive in the US?
Long story-but here's a good start-
http://sunlightfoundation.com/tools/2009/healthcare_lobbyist_complex/
Link ?
I was scouring for puffery in this piece but the length and content with quotations gave it validity. Truly astounding. And they are complaining about company policies which may have increased what $100, $200? Do they know the self employed got the back alley loan shark plans? This is one to get us fired up but this is the liberal mindset, the rules are for the masses not I.
Good Will Hunting 2: the janitor cracks his ACA budget formula.
Ah, the smell of hypocracy.
excellent article
In the immortal words of Nelson Muntz, "Haw Haw."