Damn, we had no idea sobering up would take this long! We must be getting old.
Or maybe we’re still drunk or, at the very least, deep in the throes of DT hallucinations, because this is just too damn funny to be true.
WASHINGTON — 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.
You would have thought that they’d have arrived at an actual answer by now, then, since we’re nowhere close to that. As a matter of fact, we’re further away from “reasonable” than we’ve ever been. Unless by “reasonable” they mean “unaffordable.”
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.
Ah, those dear, wacky lefties. They never change, do they? They’re always all about “paying more” for “the common good”. As long as it’s somebody else paying more, that is.
The university says the increases are in part a result of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, which many Harvard professors championed.
MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
How’s that “Affordable” working out now for you, you dimwitted communist eggheads?
The faculty vote came too late to stop the cost increases from taking effect this month, and the anger on campus remains focused on questions that are agitating many workplaces: How should the burden of health costs be shared by employers and employees? If employees have to bear more of the cost, will they skimp on medically necessary care, curtail the use of less valuable services, or both?
Ya think? No, that can’t be true. What you’re saying, that people cut back on stuff as the price of said stuff increases, is dangerously close to that whole “price and demand” nonsense that those extremist, cisgendered, heteronormative fascist racist Rethugggggnikkkans keep babbling about!
HERETIC! BURN HIM!
Professors at Harvard have until now generally avoided the higher expenses that other employers have been passing on to employees.
Yep. As long as Somebody Else™ is paying more, Progressive Socialists never saw a government diktat that they didn’t like. When they have to drag out their wallets, on the other hand…
OUTRAGE!!!!
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,” in the form of 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.
You know, if only somebody had been around back then to point out that all of those things would lead to higher prices for health care insurance…
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.”
Ah Virgil. That renowned classical expert on supply, demand and free markets! If you won’t listen to a doddering old world’s leading authority on Virgil when it comes to health care and free markets, who WILL you Neanderthals listen to?
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.
A professor specializing in the history of modern France who has failed utterly to learn a single lesson from those studies. No WONDER those Hah-vuhd geniuses command 6 figure salaries, which is almost as much as a year’s tuition at said “school” costs.
You mean to tell us, professor, that if we force you to spend more of your paycheck on something, that amounts to a pay cut or, in other words, less of your pay being available for other things such as organically grown fair trade hibiscus tea? By Vulcan’s hairy balls, the woman is a genius! She’s mastered not only the arcane art of subtraction, but also the ability to differentiate between revenue and ready cash!!! And we mere mortals are allowed, for a small six-figure yearly fee, to have our get study at her feet!?!!
Better be careful, Promethea, or you’ll find yourself chained to a mountain any day now!
“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.”
You don’t say? Welcome to the real world. You know, the one the rest of us have been living in for all of our lives. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to the gruel and the weekly beet rations.
So what is this horror, HORROR that those noble, hyper-intelligent monuments to sheer genius, champions of ObolaCare, are being suddenly and unfairly exposed to? To what extent must those horribly underpaid, struggling, noble servants of the human race part with their hard earned cash? We’re glad you asked:
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,
Actually, it’s called “copay”, but we’re glad you explained the concept to us. Most of us wouldn’t have had the foggiest if you hadn’t. It’s not like we’ve lived with them since the day we first showed up at the doctor’s office with a cough.
…for hospitalization, surgery and certain advanced diagnostic tests. The plan has an annual deductible of $250 per individual and $750 for a family.
$250 per individual and $750 for a family? That’s it? That’s it, and these pampered, underworked, overpaid and underqualified nincompoops are acting as if they’ve just been ordered to pack up for Birkenau?
Try telling your tales of woe to those average American families, the ones who actually work for a living, who’ve been unable to find a plan they could afford with a deductible less than $10,000 a year! Please. We dare you. Venture out of your Ivory Towers for a spell and go tell Mr. and Mrs. Main Street about how your annual deductible of $750 is clear proof of the oppression and corporatization of society and how you’ll barely be able to afford even ONE vacation to Mali this year as a result.
Please do. And don’t forget to tell them how you’ve been the champions of this abomination of a hostile takeover of health care in this country.
Just be sure to have your earthly affairs in order before you do, or you’re going to create a hell of a mess for your relatives’ lawyers.
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.
Oh how we wept when we read this.
Wept with laughter, that is.
How’s socialism taste now, you useless wastes of skin?
Not to worry, though. We’re sure that your Lord and Master, King Obola, will come up with an exception for you, his fellow comrades. As long as you keep proving useful to him, that is. Because if you don’t… Oh well… You know what happens next. Surely you have at least an assistant professor in the history department who’s been studying post-Imperial Russia that you can ask. Or maybe in the Asian department. Somebody with specialization in 20th century Cambodia.
Not that such an exception is going to do you much good in the long run because, as the guy in the Econ faculty, the one who keeps to himself at parties and tends to roll his eyes a lot when he thinks that nobody’s looking, the one who read Friedman can tell you, eventually you’re going to run out of other people’s money because there is no such thing as a free lunch and what can’t go on, won’t.
And then, when things start falling apart and everything reverts to a black market/barter economy as it inevitably must, you’re going to need useful skills to be able to get a hold of anything.
Useful skills.
As in “the skills of which you currently have none.”
That’s when the real fun begins.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
…
So you see, Dear Reader(s), even this year, the 2015th of our Lord, starts off with something to laugh long and loud at.
Now, if you’ll have us pardoned, we need to just sit back and bask in the glow of the majesty of this tumescent, turgid Schadenboner that we seem to be sporting all of a sudden.
Thatisall.
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