Harvard Freedom-Hater-care whine roundup

The epicenter of zeal for collectivist health care gets a taste of its own medicine.  (I rather doubt that I'm the first one to make that pun.)

Can't think of what I'd add to what any of these folks have to say about it, so here you go:

Mockarena of Chicks on the Right.

Rich Lowry at NRO.

Emily Zanotti at The American Spectator.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air takes a look at the Left's response to our schadenfreude:

Jonathan Chait argued that the Right didn’t appear to realize they were laughing at their own solutions:

What makes this response funny, if not unusual, is that the reforms currently roiling the Harvard faculty are moderate versions of the reforms conservatives themselves not only have championed but continue to champion. …

But of course the conservative objection to Obamacare isn’t that its silver plan, covering 70 percent of health-care costs, is too skimpy. The objection is just the opposite. Conservatives hate, or claim to hate, Obamacare because its benefits are too generous. They propose instead to replace the law with far skimpier benefits, so that healthy individuals can enjoy the low premiums that come with bare-bones plans covering fewer claims and offering less protection. They don’t think the 70 percent of costs covered in the Obamacare exchanges is too low. They think it’s too high.

Well, yes and no … but mostly no. Conservatives wanted to restore pricing signals, it’s true — as did Harvard’s faculty, about which more later — but not coercively, and certainly not with a universal mandate to buy comprehensive health coverage. The conservative solutions to pricing signals were to incentivize the use of health-savings accounts, move the industry to hospitalization coverage, and encourage the growth of retail-care clinics for routine care on a competitive fee basis. That would have protected people against serious illness while alleviating costs for both insurers and providers. It also would have reduced prices by eliminating insurance overhead on most routine care and forcing providers to compete on price. That works in the Lasik and plastic-surgery markets, neither of which usually deals with insurance, and both of which have seen prices controlled through market forces without government interventions and mandates.

The mandate for comprehensive insurance made the pricing signal situation worse. It enforces pricing opacity across a wider range of consumers while increasing burdens for insurers and especially providers, many of whom are bailing out of these networks and moving to concierge service instead. ObamaCare’s mandate also serves as a perverse wealth transfer from the young, healthy, and generally poorer population to the older, wealthier, and more sickly population.

As does Patrick Brennan at NRO:

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.

Derrick Wilburn at The American Thinker expands the focus to a discussion of the overall disconnect between the university campus and the normal-people world, particularly with regard for the prospects for amassing wealth.

I doubt if this is the last bit of irony that FHer-care  will be engendering.