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IPFS News Link • Obamacare

Harvard Professors in "Uproar" After Learning Obamacare Applies to Them!

• http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com-Mike S.

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.

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."

The university is adopting standard features of most employer-sponsored health plans: Employees will now pay deductibles and a share of the costs, known as coinsurance, for hospitalization, surgery and certain advanced diagnostic tests.


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