A couple of weeks ago I noted that congressional Democrats were working on a plan to effectively kill health savings accounts. The WSJ reports that the plot continues apace:
This week, the House passed legislation that included a provision to require every HSA transaction be reviewed and verified as a legitimate medical expense … it adds a layer […]
The bête noire of the nanny state liberal is the autonomous citizen making her own decisions without interference from the government. Thus, congressional Democrats intend to throttle consumer-driven health care in the cradle. This policy brief from the RSC explains how they plan to do it:
Democrats are considering requiring “substantiation” of all HSA transactions from an independent third party […]
The elderly bobby-soxer of TAP, as Mark Steyn aptly describes Ezra Klein, inadvertantly exposes the essential paternalism that animates the single-payer project:
Liberal solutions don’t try and force the individual into a governing role he or she is not equipped to assume.
In other words, the hoi polloi are simply too stupid to make their own health care decisions, so their betters in […]
The annual rise in group health plan costs, a major component of health care inflation, has stabilized according to Financial Week. The 6.1% rate is still way too high, but it is coming down:
It is a big improvement from just a few years ago, when annual health plan increases were rising by double digits and employers despaired about […]
A variety of pro-single-payer blogs gleefully linked to a recent “study” purportedly showing that women are penalized by HSA plans simply because they are female. To quote Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, the study’s author:
High-deductible plans punish women for having breasts and uteruses and having babies.
That tendentious assertion suggests that the good doctor is not as objective […]
Jason Furman of the Hamilton Project has put forward an HSA plan that, at first glance, seems pretty sensible:
I propose that households pay 50 percent of their expenses up to 7.5 percent of income, with no cost sharing for low-income households and a $15,000 limit for high-income households.
This will, in his estimation, resolve the “one-size-fits-all” […]
Joe Paduda at Managed Care Matters is understandably frustrated by his inability to get straight answers from his insurance carrier or prospective providers to his questions about allowable amounts and procedure prices:
I called our health insurer … [and] asked what the allowable amount would be. They could not tell me … When I asked the […]
Confusion characterizes much of the public discourse about health care reform and nowhere is this more evident than in the area of consumer-driven health care. A case in point is this post on the Concurring Opinions weblog, in which Frank Pasquale confuses the CDHC issue with the specialty hospital controversy:
Some aspects of CDHC have a […]