Health Savings Accounts and High-Deductible Health Insurance Plans

Health Savings Accounts and High Deductible Health Insurance Plans: Implications for those with High Medical Costs, the Low-Income, and the Uninsured

Early experience with high-deductible and consumer-driven health plans: findings from the EBRI/Commonwealth Fund Consumerism in Health Care Survey.

• The latest “big idea”—Promoting consumerism in health care is the latest big idea in health insurance in the United States. One of the leading manifestations of this is the use of high-deductible health plans with savings accounts, such as health savings accounts (HSAs) and health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs), collectively known as consumer-driven health plans (CDHPs). The first EBRI/Com...

Consumer-directed health care for persons under 65 years of age with private health insurance: United States, 2007.

Data from the National Health Interview Survey. In 2007, 17.3% of persons under 65 years of age with private health insurance were enrolled in a high deductible health plan (HDHP), 4.5% were enrolled in a consumer-directed health plan (CDHP), and 14.8% were in a family with a flexible spending account for medical expenses (FSA); Persons with directly purchased private health insurance were more...

Commentary--Defined contribution health plans: attracting the healthy and well-off.

Driven by a philosophy that favors unbridled faith in the free marketplace, the year 2003 may well go down in health care history as the year that the health care system officially abandoned the premise that the community has a responsibility to care for each member, replacing it with the philosophy that individuals should each look after themselves. The most visible change that nudges the syst...

How much more cost sharing will health savings accounts bring?

Proponents of health savings accounts (HSAs) contend that they will reduce medical expenditures. In practice, however, the effect of HSAs, and the high-deductible health plans that must accompany them, will depend on the actual provisions of those plans and of the plans they replace. We show that typical plans in the market today already contain substantial cost sharing. We find that many HSA/h...