Harvard professors will now have $20 co-pays for doctor visits. Thanks Obama!
By In Harvard’s health care enrollment guide for 2015, the university said it “must respond to the national trend of rising health care costs, including some driven by health care reform,” otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act. The guide said that Harvard faced “added costs” because of provisions in the health care law that extend coverage for children up to age 26, offer free preventive services like mammograms and colonoscopies and, starting in 2018, add a tax on high-cost insurance, known as the Cadillac tax.
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. The plan has an annual deductible of $250 per individual and $750 for a family. For a doctor’s office visit, the charge is $20. For most other services, patients will pay 10 percent of the cost until they reach the out-of-pocket limit of $1,500 for an individual and $4,500 for a family.
Previously, Harvard employees paid a portion of insurance premiums and had low out-of-pocket costs when they received care.
Michael E. Chernew, a health economist and the chairman of the university benefits committee, which recommended the new approach, acknowledged that “with these changes, employees will often pay more for care at the point of service.” In part, he said, “that is intended because patient cost-sharing is proven to reduce overall spending.”
According to the AAUP, the average salary for Harvard full professors is currently $207,100, and their average total compensation (including the lousy health care plan) is $262,300.
. . . numerous commenters make the fair point that Harvard’s new plan might be quite burdensome to the large number of Harvard employees making a lot less than TT professors. The school offers some protection against high co-insurance costs to lower-paid employees, but it’s also fair to ask why an institution with a $36 billion (!) endowment can’t be more generous to its employees, especially those who aren’t near the top of the pay scale. And although Harvard’s new plan is actually a good one compared to the health care options provided by most employers, that’s just another sign of how dysfunctional the American health care system remains, despite whatever marginal improvements are provided by the ACA.