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.
[T]he Harvard plan is still really generous. Professors will have better, more robust insurance coverage than most other people who get insurance at work. And they'll definitely have better plans than the people buying coverage through Obamacare's marketplace. The New York Times story reports that the new Harvard plan will cover, on average, 91 percent of enrollees' costs.... A plan that covers 91 percent of enrollees' costs is not unprecedented. But it is definitely better than what most workers get offered.
What makes this response funny, if not unusual, is that the reforms currently roiling the Harvard faculty are moderate versions of the reforms conservatives themselves not only have championed but continue to champion. The theory undergirding Harvard's changes is that excessively generous health insurance is inefficient. If consumers bear zero cost, they will over-consume health-care services, thus driving up prices for everybody in the system. [...] As the Times reports, the changes are a response to Harvard's own health-care experts, many of whom advocated for Obamacare. The story has thus entered the conservative mind as a case of liberal elites suffering under the yolk of a liberal program. "One imagines how all these pampered academics would feel if they were forced to use a silver (70% covered) Obamacare plan..." gloats Red State. But of course the conservative objection to Obamacare isn't that its silver plan, covering 70 percent of health-care costs, is too skimpy. The objection is just the opposite. Conservatives hate, or claim to hate, Obamacare because its benefits are too generous. They propose instead to replace the law with far skimpier benefits, so that healthy individuals can enjoy the low premiums that come with bare-bones plans covering fewer claims and offering less protection. They don't think the 70 percent of costs covered in the Obamacare exchanges is too low. They think it's too high.