Until very recently, employees at Harvard University have been spared the healthcare imbroglios that plague the rest of the country. Harvard experts on economics and policy frequently advise both the president and Congress on healthcare concerns. This month, however, insurance costs have risen at the 378-year-old university. Suddenly, the professors are in an uproar.

The Harvard Medical School is affiliated with of some of the world’s best (and most expensive) hospitals. In addition, an annual endowment valued at $36 billion, allowed the university to maintain a program that protected employees from high out-of-pocket costs.

Perhaps that is why for the past five years, Harvard professors have publicly advocated the Affordable Health Care Act (more commonly referred to as ObamaCare). Indeed, in 2009 a widely publicized letter to the White House, the nation’s leading economists stressed that cost-containment features, such as the Cadillac Tax, were crucial to correcting the fiscal trajectory of the healthcare system. Dr. Alan M. Garber, currently the provost of Harvard University, led the effort.

The hypocrisy centers on consumer cost-sharing. The idea is that when insurance covers everything and the patient never sees the bill, they will visit as many doctors and have as many tests performed as their plan will allow. By shifting some of the cost burden onto the patient, they will make more prudent decisions. They will only see the doctors they need to see and only take the tests they need to take.

That is the idea anyways. And that is what the Harvard economists were preaching in 2009. Their arguments helped sway many Democrats to push ObamaCare through Congress over the objections of the electorate.

Now, the New York Times reports that Harvard employees are no longer so eager for cost containment. Meredith B. Rosenthal, a professor of health economics and policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, had been a signatory of the 2009 letter. She publicly endorsed consumer cost-sharing as a way to reign in the unwieldy healthcare system. Yet in a statement in the New York Times, she denounces the very same method of cost control as a “blunt instrument”. That faced with higher costs, “consumers make choices that do not appear to be in their best interests” and are likely to face even costlier medical expenses in the future.

Harvard employees will still have generous insurance plan. Yet, that these academic elite cannot take their own advice is disappointing at a time when guidance is most needed.