Do you have an HSA?

Not so. The British National Health Service started in 1946 works well. Not perfectly, but the vast majority of people are very satisfied with it. You will of course hear stories to the contrary but that's because the media always pick up and exaggerate negative events.
If it doesn't work well why do all political parties, right, left and centre support it and say that they will improve and enhance it if elected?

 

Because if any elected official in GB said, “My good chaps, the time has come where we all should pay for our own health care out of our own pockets, rather than get it free from the government.†. . . they may not even last till the next election cycle. . . where they would be voted out of office by a 99.98% margin.
Let the genie out of the bottle, it's hard to put back in. <_<

It's pathetic that there are hungry people in the USA. Maybe the government should pay for everyone's meals too. That is health related.
It's pathetic that there are homeless people in the USA. Maybe the government should buy everyone their own house. That too is health related.
It's pathetic that everyone in the USA can't afford to heat their houses to 80 degrees or cool them to 65 degrees. Maybe the government should pay everyone's energy bills. For some that too is heath related.
It's pathetic that everyone in the USA can't afford to get the Discovery Health Chanel on cable TV. Another case of The Haves vs. The Have-nots. The government should do something about that inequity too.

If you want utopia, maybe we should send a delegation to North Korea and see how they do it.

 

We took an HSA last year for the Partners of the business. We are all completely healthy, no medical problems. I'm 50, wife 37, kids 8,6, and 1. Our premium on a 500 deductable was going to be about 1500/month. The HSA (4400 deductable) was about 1100/month.

The problem was that I was unwilling to let my wife take the kids to the doctor unless it was a real emergency, since you have to pay the full amount (negotiated down, but still alot). I didn't like being in that position. I was unconfortable.

This year, we're going back to the 500 deductable, since fortunately Aetna is trying to penetrate our market at the rates are artificially lower for this year only. Our HSA with United was going to go up another 34% this year!

Actually, I'm a physician. Our reimbursements haven't really gone up at all in the last 8 years, where are the insurance companies (and hosptials) stuffing all these premiums.

 

Chiming in with the thread highjacking.....

More and more Nationalized Health Care is critical to the economic security of our country. Large unizonized companies are bleeding red ink under the weight of their health care costs (think GM and Ford). They can't compete on the world market because their health care costs are too high. Ultimately, this will drive up unemployment and drive down wages for everyone (30,000 Ford layoffs anyone) and everyone suffers. On the other end, large low-wage non-unionized companies (think Wal-Mart) offer health care plans that their workers cannot afford or have extremely limited benefits. This creates an incredible drain on the social welfare net - huge lines at clinics, patients going to emergency rooms for routine maledies, medical problems that would be simple to treat if caught sooner being left until they become expensive and complicated problems.

Some people say that government sponsored health care would be horribly inefficient, but in practice that has not been the case. Medicare spends about 2% of its budget on administration, compared to almost 10% for private insurers, and Medicare uses the power of large purchases to keep health care costs down - Medicare's pay scale is fair for providers while still being much lower than cash charges for the same treatment. If everyone in the country were eligible for Medicare or an equivalent government plan, we could bring down the total amount of money spent on healthcare, have a fair distribution of the costs rather than burdening our industries and local governments to improve the profits of businesses who don't provide for their workers, and become more competitive on the world stage.

Another burden on the health care system is the cost of lawsuits. This is not as big a deal as some people pushing tort reform would have you believe, but moderate reforms along with nationalized health care would save us, the economy as a whole, huge sums.

Back to the original topic....

Oh. I have a very small FSA because, as it was noted, FSAs are use it or lose it on an annual basis. I would seriously consider shifting some of my savings to an HSA if the numbers worked out.

 

You seem to see merit in the kind of society we had in the UK in the 19th century when starving and homeless beggars of all ages roamed the streets, when the workless or aged, were thrown into workhouses where they suffered extreme deprivation and disciplines. Today the unemployed are given a basic income on which they can survive; the aged or the chronic sick are given regular pensions; efforts are made to house the homeless by local government; grants for extra fuel are given every winter to pensioners; there's even free TV for all aged over 75.
It's not Utopia - it's progress, something you seem to resist.

 

Well, as a physician, I beg to differ on whether medicare reimbursements to physician providers are sufficient. They are not. What we get paid does not cover the costs of our specialized employee wages and benefits, let alone the physician actually providing the services. This means that the charges for other privately insured patients must be artificially higher to supplement the medicare reimbursements for the care of those patients.

Back to HSA's. I believe they only made sense for those completely healthy who have no need for routine or ongoing medical services. If you had any steady use of the policy, the deductable would fully erode any balance in the HSA cash account. The insurance really is only for catastrophic coverage, like an accident, or some out of the blue uncommon disease occurance.

Unfortunately, most insurance companies restrict the selection of policies that best suit the buyer. They will not offer certain HSAs to certain groups if statistically they don't think it will net them a profit. As an employer, they will look at all your employees, ages, health status, etc. and offer only certain HSAs paired with cetain policies that will best insure them a profit. Our young, healthy employee was not even allowed to choose a full high deductable HSA in our case.

 

My apologies, I didn't mean to overstate my case and if Medicare reimbursements really aren't sufficient, that's another part of the problem that needs to be solved.

I do believe that there is a certain minimum standard of medical care that is a basic human right, but even if one does not agree with that premise, I believe the economics of heath care in the United States place our country in great economic peril and cry out to be changed.

The last time that was part of the political debate in the United States, 1993 and 1994, the people who really tried their hardest to come up with a balanced solution paid a very heavy political price. Now restructuring health care in this country is something that very few political leaders have the cajones to take on.

What those people who make the argument that one ought to be responsible for their own health care costs don't realize is that we are already suffering worse at the hands of free riders today than we ever could under an equitable nationalized plan.

• Everytime a Wal-Mart shareholder gets paid a dividend, part of that money comes from the budget of the county of Los Angeles, where I pay property taxes, and where there are thousands of uninsured Wal-Mart workers clogging County clinics and emergency rooms. I'm paying for that with my taxes and the Wal-Mart shareholder is getting the benefit.
• Meanwhile trauma centers throughout the county have closed their doors because for-profit medical corporations can't afford their medical professionals' moral obligation not to let the uninsured who cannot pay die. Someday, I could pay for that with my life.
• Everytime my employer sees an increase in health care premiums that increases the chance that they will contract out my job to a country with nationalized health care, because even with higher taxes that makes a lower dent in their bottom line.

When more of us in the United States who have employer paid health care lose our jobs to Canadians, and Indians and Irishmen, and wages are lower as a result, we will realize we were wrong about Nationalized Health Care, but it will be too late and we will be living in our own dystopia. Our new dystopia may not rival the workhouses of 19th Century Britian, but you better believe your children's standard of living will be less than your own.

FSAs and HSAs and Medicare Part D are not solutions either. HSAs and FSAs do nothing to help control costs or provide care for the working poor and Medicare Part D, which could have been a great opportunity to help control costs, actually has written into the law that HHS is not allowed to negotiate prices of prescriptions, a provision only a drug company could love.

 

I guess all that rambling was directed at my comment that it is pathetic that a country as wealthy as ours doesn't choose to provide BASIC HEALTHCARE for its citizens. Rather bizarre, this method of yours of carrying my statement onward to bunches of illogical conclusions, and then pretending that they're mine. Try dealing with the points actually raised by others, instead of putting words into their mouths. Providing basic healthcare to all citizens is not only the MORAL thing to do (where the hell are all these so called christians NOW?), it is even GOOD BUSINESS! Do it now, or do it later in the emergency room for vastly more money. Should be an easy choice...then again, so should have the last presidential election...

 

It's mind boggling that you cannot fathom about room for progress in a healthcare debacle that we are having right now in the United States. It needs a solid overhaul of some kind and truly needs to be addressed, and millions of other citizens conclude that something has to be done rather sooner than later.
There are many other western societies which do have way better functional health care systems (nothing is perfect). It's not UTOPIA it's PROGRESS, just like Oxo and Zacher stated.
What I find pathetic is that you would make statements on UK's behalf, based on what??? The things you've heard from your "envy of the free world" (as you put it) US based news???
I feel sorry for folks like you.
Your sarcasm about North Korea is rather pathetic. Perhaps you could use Norway or Finland next time as an example. The only delegation you have been involved with in the past was to drop some bombs around and police unruly states, therefore I do not think you can see clearly now as the world seems like a threat to be confronted with.
Your assumption that you live in heaven on earth already is rather scary.