The end of the world health insurance as we know it
Niko Karvounos and Maggie Mahar have an excellent, and somewhat scary, post up at the Health Beat blog about how health-insurance companies are using health savings accounts to, in effect, turn themselves into very profitable -- and practically unregulated -- banks.
The accounts provide the companies with cash. The administrative fees provide them with profits (and you thought $3 for using some other bank's ATM was bad). And the whole system of health savings accounts is geared toward the healthier, higher-income end of the spectrum because, although the premiums for high-deductible insurance plans linked to HSAs are in fact lower, they're still high enough to put a squeeze on middle- and lower-income households ... and paying the deductibles, for some, will turn out to be flat impossible.
"This shift isn’t about empowerment," the authors write. "It’s the end of health insurance as we know it -- and the beginning of more dangerous, under-regulated financial management." And when even former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan is admitting under oath before Congress that the fruits of under-regulation have left him in a "state of shocked disbelief," this probably isn't the time to encourage people to put whatever savings they might be able to muster into risky investments that have little oversight.
