Letter From America (About Nimbyism)

That's Not What We Meant, At All

The whole animation of Obamacare is that the wealthy end up paying more so as to subsidise the health care of those less wealthy than they.  The mechanism to achieve this would be the the socialisation of health insurance premiums.  The wealthy's premiums are rising in order to subsidise the premiums of those who are not so wealthy.   Obama and the Democrats "got away" with it by swearing black and blue that this was not so.  In other words, the lie was deliberately forged and propagated by cunning elites.  The rest of the Democrats remained ignorant and just parroted the official "talking points".  Silly "useful idiots"--they trusted their leaders.  How quaint.  

Now Harvard academics are "finding out what's in the Bill"--and they are mad--despite being strongly supportive of Obamacare, and, despite some of their colleagues having been donkey-deep in its design. "Not In My Back Yard" rules amongst the Harvard elites.

Harvard Ideas on Health Care Hit Home, Hard

By ROBERT PEAR 

JAN. 5, 2015

New York Times

WASHINGTON — 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?

“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.”

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,” in the form of 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.

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.” . . .

In addition, 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 [i.e. wealthier people paying for the healthcare of the less wealthy, aka socialised health care. Ed], 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.” . . . .

Except that Professor Green is just ignorant.  Every socialist health system in the world taxes the sick at all times for their health as well as the health of others.  That's just just how socialist systems work--everywhere.