Is This the Most Disingenuous Liberal Talking Point to Come Out of the Epic Harvard Obamacare Revolt?

Spread the love

Loading

Patrick Brennan:

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait says he’s confused by conservative glee over the news that Harvard professors are complaining about changes to their health plans due to Obamacare. The faculty is mad about an increase in their out-of-pocket costs, such as higher annual deductibles.

Conservatives, Chait points out, would like consumers in general to pay for a greater share of their health care out of pocket, rather than consuming it through our byzantine tax-sheltered insurance system. Adrianna McIntyre, a health-policy writer formerly of Vox, says she’s therefore “baffled” that conservatives are taking the professors’ side in this debate.

McIntyre and Chait may not be Harvard faculty (yet) but they’re smarter than this: Conservatives aren’t saying a $750 family deductible is too high or some great abuse. They’re saying it’s funny that Harvard professors think it’s too high, because said professors generally like Obamacare, and (according to Harvard) Obamacare is the reason their employer is raising it.

Liberal writers engaged in something similar about a year ago, expressing shock that conservatives kept pointing out how the high deductibles of Obamacare-exchange plans can be a burden for a lot of Americans. But conservatives say they’re for high deductibles and having skin in the game, liberals said, as if this was some kind of significant, esoteric insight.

Obamacare hiked the cost of health insurance (leaving aside subsidies) by implementing higher taxes and huge new regulations. Those meant higher deductibles and higher premiums.

Conservatives therefore criticized both developments, even though sometimes they think other policies that produce higher deductibles are a good thing. Liberals sometimes like to argue that people really only care about ends and that all process requirements are disingenuous — I’m tempted to see what Chait’s doing as a particularly insane extension of that argument.

“Harvard’s reforms show that in some ways, Obamacare has pushed the health-care system moderately in the direction conservatives favor, by encouraging employers to shift more of the cost of care onto employees,” Chait writes. But thedevelopment at Harvard is higher overall health-insurance costs — no one favors that. Harvard chose to pass some of the higher cost on to its employees through out-of-pocket increases, which has nothing to do with the fundamental structure of Obamacare except inasmuch as it forces costs up almost everywhere.

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of

2 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Liberals don’t get it. I don’t think they CAN get it.

There are few things better than hearing the liberal piggies squeal about the monster they created