Obviously, this NYT story deserved a lot of play.
“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.”
As individuals, Harvard employees are like everyone else. We all want unlimited access to medical services without having to pay for them. Of course, once somebody thinks about that for a a second, they realize that it is unworkable. You either have to limit access to services, or you have to make people pay for services so that they ration themselves. Obamacare tries to do some of both. When it tries to limit access, opponents scream “Death panels!” When it tries to make people pay for services, they scream, as some are quoted in the article “You’re putting a tax on the sick!” Among the latter screamers, I am sorry to say, is Jerry Green, a mathematical micro-theorist who goes back to the heyday of that stuff.
If I’m President of Harvard, I would say, “Fine. We’ll get rid of health insurance altogether if you don’t like it. Instead, we’ll give you that money in cash. Go out and buy your own health insurance. Stop complaining to us about the health insurance plan we provide.”
Which is one of many reasons I am not President of Harvard.
If I’m President of Harvard, I would say, “Fine. We’ll get rid of health insurance altogether if you don’t like it. Instead, we’ll give you that money in cash. Go out and buy your own health insurance. Stop complaining to us about the health insurance plan we provide.”
If Congress makes full time 80 hours instead of 30 or 40, the President of Harvard could do this.
Then only some grad students, post docs, and assistant professors would be insured through Harvard, and the tenured staff could stop whining.
It’s fair to tell people that they have to pay, one way or another, for broad array of healthcare choices and smaller deductibles. What is unfair about Obamacare (as I understand it), and what these Harvard professors are complaining about, is that it makes most people pay more for less choice and higher deductibles than what they previously had – all for the greater good of providing marginally better coverage to the poor (including poor immigrants whose presence we are told is so essential to our prosperity) and the small number of people who previously couldn’t, or didn’t, obtain insurance. Of course, these Harvard professors (aside from the very few nonleftists among them) have no right to complain because they supported Obama and the ACA. I would love to see them all relegated to Medicaid.
They could use the snazzy new government run Healthcare Exchanges to find the best policy. Plus, they’d be doing their part to keep the Exchanges demographically stable.
“If I’m President of Harvard, I would say, ‘Fine. We’ll get rid of health insurance altogether if you don’t like it. Instead, we’ll give you that money in cash. Go out and buy your own health insurance. Stop complaining to us about the health insurance plan we provide.’ ”
That’s a deal that many, if not most, employers have long wished to be able to make. They’ve been stymied by the tax preference for employer-paid health “insurance,” which Congress could reverse with a stroke of the pen.
Ken