The future of health care in the US: Health Savings Accounts

This past Thursday we had a mandatory training session on the next big thing in health insurance...Health Savings Accounts or HSAs...what they are is this: out of your already meager check you assume what your health costs for the next year will be and that amount is taken out of your check, divided by the number of pay periods per year.

HSAs are high deductible plans. You put away so much money per year to pay for the coinsurance and deductible. In some cases but definitely not all, your employer may contribute some money. Where I work they are currently contributing half of the deductible amount but I suspect that's only to encourage people to sign up for these plans. Out of that money that you put away, you pay your deductible and coinsurance up to the maximum out of pocket expense (MOOP). The plan they were pushing at work had a MOOP of $5100 for single folks and $10,200 for a family.

Oy vey! Oh I might add that HSAs or MSAs (Medical Savings Accounts) were a pet project of the guy who used own Golden Rule Insurance.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/15/157222


Those are the people that do need to be taken care of, but I think we need in America to empower individuals through programs such as health savings accounts combined with catastrophic coverage. I think in that way, we're going to see even better care and the uninsured will be reduced and the costs will go down, because when people spend their own money, they spend it more carefully, than when they spend someone else's.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Rachlis.

DR. MICHAEL RACHLIS: I know that Ms. Pipes' plan which includes something called the medical savings account is difficult to describe in just a few minutes on the radio. It claims that by making the system essentially more private, by having higher co pays, by having less government involvement, that somehow this is going to lead to cost control. It won't. The lessons of the industrialized world are that the United States is basically the only country that has -- that relies mainly on the market for the delivery of health services and the financing of health services, rather. It is the only country that has this terrible problem with coverage. So, and it also is the country that has by far the highest cost. The U.S. is spending this year almost 15% of the economy on health care compared to less than 10% in Canada. And we're near the high end of other countries, Germany, France spend more or less what we do, Sweden spends less. Britain spends a lot less. So, the United States spends the most and has massive coverage problems. And people who aren't from the United States, the analysts who are not from the United States, tend to think that the problems are related, that the only way that the cost control is when you get a single payer system where one organization in Canada, the government, pays 70% or so of our health bills. They can negotiate tougher with hospitals and physicians, and at the same time, have everyone covered. So, I think that Americans tend to think that you can't get cost control when you go to universal coverage, it will make it worse. The lessons in Canada and other countries are that the only way to get cost control is cover everybody.

and younger folks with significant health care expenses.

It's a plan only a rich man would think makes any sense at all.

Typical GOP: "If you aint rich, just DIE, already!"

And that's saying some.

Cost controls make the most sense to me and that's the one thing they are not doing. HSA's are probably the idea that does the least to help our health care problem and that's what they want to do. OMG I just can't believe that this is the solution we have come up with. God help my poor country :(

That one said if we cut taxes, the revenues would increase enormously because investments will be sky high.After nearly three decades of that cockamamie economic theory the only thing that has increased beyond even Laffer's wet dreams is our deficits.Now the same people have another snake oil prescription to sell us.