“Reason” magazine is in fact one of my favorite sites, and I urge all 17 of my readers to check it out, but sometimes one’s schadenfreude can run ahead of one’s “reason.” Here, Reasonette Robby Soave chuckles over the plight of Harvard profs who suddenly discover that, thanks to their man Obama, they have to pay more for health care. Robby links to the New York Times, where Robert Pear reports on the agony of the Cambridge crew, and picks up some choice quotes from pampered academics who suddenly find that they have to pay for their own health care:
“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.” …
“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?”1
“I’m of course sympathetic to people whose healthcare costs have been negatively impacted by federal intervention,” Robby acknowledges. “Still, most Harvard professors are likely in better shape to cope with such changes than the average person.”
But Robby doesn’t pick up some of the more interesting points from the NYT article, that the “higher costs” being complained about are in part due to provisions in the Affordable Care Act that reduce subsidization of health insurance via the federal tax code, which, libertarians and other right-thinking folks agree, is a consummation devoutly to be wished. One reason why the U.S. spends so much on health care is that health insurance here is aggressively subsidized, either via employer-provided health insurance, which is tax-free, or Medicare, which is absurdly generous. In addition, as the Harvard folks are discovering, the Affordable Care Act also has provisions that encourage employers to require employees to pay deductibles and a share of the costs (“coinsurance”) for some health services, measures intended to bring “market forces” to bear on health spending decisions—something that “Reason” ought to support, not deplore.
Afterwords
Pear’s full article is well worth reading, if you’re into the ins and outs of Obamacare. Over at New York magazine, Jonathan Chait also puts the wood to right-wing hypocrisy, though he treads lightly on the left-wing hypocrisy on display at Harvard.
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Naturally, the profs (well, some of them at least), explain that they aren’t worried about themselves. No, they’re only worried about the “little people.” ↩︎
