Yesterday I commented on Jeff Cornwall’s assertion that health care would be less expensive if only catastrophic illnesses were insured. A post on The Health Care Blog titled Not much employer backing for HSAs suggests that this is not the case.
According to the quoted report, there are only one fourth as many health savings accounts as high deductible health plans. This would only make economic sense if health plan members anticipated having no out of pocket health care expenditures. How could this be the case? Only if these members were significantly healthier than the population as a whole, or if those members were foregoing cost effective preventive care (though some disagree on the cost effectiveness of preventive medicine). Therefore, high deductible employer-sponsored health plans would be one means (and an economically inefficient one) for employers to shift the cost of health on to the overall society.
