Harvard Professors, Once Champions of Obamacare, Take a Different Tack as Health Care Costs Rise

Despite its inconsistencies, Obamacare seems to have one consistent trend: Those who once supported the law now want immunity from it.

The latest case study is Harvard University.

The university’s faculty is fighting against rising health care costs largely driven by the Affordable Care Act—the very legislation professors at Harvard once supported.

Members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, “the heart of the 378-year-old university,” voted in November against the increased health care costs, according to the New York Times. But the vote came too late and professors are now outraged at the impending changes.

Classics professor Richard Thomas described the health care increases as “deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university” in an interview with the Times.

Mary Lewis, a professor in the history of modern France, equated the increased costs to a pay cut.

“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 Times.

Harvard’s 2015 health care enrollment guide tells its employers that the university “must respond to the national trend of rising health care costs, including some driven by health care reform.”

The guide points to the extended coverage for employees’ children up to the age of 26, preventive care and the impending “Cadillac tax,” which will add a 40 percent tax on more expensive plans in 2018.

The New York Times reports:

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.

“It’s equivalent to taxing the sick,” Jerry Green, a professor of economics who has been on Harvard’s staff for more than 40 years, told the Times. “I don’t think there’s any government in the world that would tax the sick.”

The Times notes that Harvard employees previously paid only a portion of their premiums and had low out-of-pocket costs.

Under Obamacare, employees will now have to pay 10 percent of health care costs until the $1,500 limit is reached for an individual or $4,500 for a family.

Despite Harvard’s increased costs, the university’s prices still remain far lower than most employers’ health care costs under Obamacare.