Health Savings Account Blog

According to Antos:

- CDHC is a way to break the health inflationary spiral by making consumers more aware of costs, but it puts a premium on information about cost, quality and effectiveness of care.

- We are years away from the kind of information infrastructure needed for an efficient health care system of any kind.

- Directly or indirectly, workers pay for their own health insurance and as a matter of sound policy and social justice, we should redirect government subsidies so that they are better focused on those who need the help.

According to Goodman:

- CDHC is not about shifting costs to employees, it is about shifting money so that employees can manage their own health-care dollars.

- It is also about patient power -- having patients make the often-difficult choices between health care and other uses of money instead of having those choices made by large, impersonal bureaucracies.

- To improve the system, rationing by waiting -- paying with time -- should be replaced with rationing by pricing, which would let providers compete to solve problems.

According to Reischauer:

- One of the major problems facing the nation's health-care system is rapidly rising health-care costs and it's unlikely that CDHC will prove to be a significant solution to this problem.

- A more sensible approach would be reference pricing; under this system, basic insurance would cover (with some modest co-insurance) the cost of an efficiently provided service that met acceptable quality standards.