We heard again from the President last night that the silver bullet cure to the health care crisis in this country is through health savings accounts, commonly known as HSA’s. Just like a savings account, you put money in on a periodic basis and use it to pay deductibles when you’re in need of health care.
The pitch is that because it’s “your” money, you’ll shop for low-cost health care, thereby reducing costs. Like most insurance pitches though, this one is completely false and the opposite is often true: that HSA’s actually reduce cost sharing for most people.
While the President continues to pitch this type of plan as a “step to making health care affordable for more Americans”, that just isn’t true because it does nothing to actually address the real reason health care is so expensive in this country.
Even if you have an HSA today, the cost of health care, and thus the cost to you, continues to rise at a meteoric rate. The fact is you just couldn’t keep plugging enough money into your “savings” away year after year to keep up with the 10-25% increase in the cost of health care.
It’s no different than trying to keep up with making the payments on a mortgage if the interest rate climbed year after year after year. Pretty soon the bank is gonna start calling about foreclosure.
And in fact that exact scenario is playing out more and more frequently as those who rely on HSA’s for their health care are more often delinquent on their medical bills. It’s called insurance for a reason, and there’s a good reason it’s been with us throughout the course of modern civilization.
The time is coming that we’re going to have to have a serious conversation in this country about a unified health care system that provides all Americans with the treatment and care they deserve. I don’t expect that day will come while President Bush is in office, but that doesn’t mean it’s not coming.
My own Representative Gwen Moore sums up the President’s plans in his SOTU address last night about as well as I could:
“Bush has often pushed for an ownership society in America. His health care proposal is yet another example of what he means by that: You’re on your own.” -Â WI Rep. Gwen Moore
I live in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI with my wife Jen, our daughter Emerson, and sons Carter and Colton.
HSA’s do address one bad area of health care in the US. There is a tax advantage to getting health care through your employer. However this causes issues related to companies finding out and caring about your medical conditions than they would otherwise need to. And it makes the relationship between your doctor and you even more tenuous. Instead of working for you, they are working for your insurance company who is getting paid by your employer.
Health care in the US is definitely screwed up, but there isn’t going to be any magic fix that fixes all of the problems. Also making any major change is going to be difficult because entrenched players are going to bribe a lot of politicians to make sure they don’t lose out in the change.
that just isn’t true because it does nothing to actually address the real reason health care is so expensive in this country.
And the “real” reason health care is so expensive is?
(I don’t intend this to sound offensive)I think you lack a true, complete understanding of HSAs. It’s nothing like if a mortgage would increase, blah, blah.