Another boondoggle for corporate America...

At the expense of the average American. It’s called an HSA health insurance plan. I have a real soft spot in my heart for these plans, seeing that I and my family are victims – I mean participants – of such a plan.

These HSA (health savings account) plans are touted as a method to give Americans greater flexibility on their healthcare spending, and allows participants to "save" money in a bank account, which can then be used to pay for health care not covered by the insurance portion of the plan.

What Bush & Co. (who have been the champions of this approach) don't tell you is that the main beneficiaries of this type of plan are the financial institutions that "manage" the HSA accounts (translates to: "make lots of profits off of other people's money"), and the employers who offer these plans to their employees.

Why is it advantageous to the employers? Because they get to write off their employee's contributions to the HSA accounts on their taxes. That's right, they get to take credit for the employee contributions as EMPLOYER contributions. In the case of my company, they have 4000 employees corporate-wide. At an average of about $2000 annually set aside by employees for their HSA accounts, that's an $8,000,000.00 tax write-off for the company.

Nice perk eh? And of course my company, like all the other companies who will jump on this corporate welfare bandwagon, pretty much shoved the plan down the employee’s throat. In the name of “maintaining consistency” across the corporation, they eliminated all other plans that were available to employees. After all, the more employees in this plan, the bigger their tax break. Makes sense.

The other corporate advantage to an HSA plan: You have to meet your entire deductible (excluding “qualifying” preventative care) before the insurance company has to pay a dime of benefits. They are often referred to as HDHP HSA Plans. The HDHP? It stands for “High Deductible Health Plan”. As a matter of fact, to qualify as an HSA plan, there is a MINIMUM deductible for both individual and family. Here’s the requirement:

“A qualified HSA plan has a single deductible that applies to all medical expenses covered by the insurance policy whether you are insuring yourself or an entire family. This deductible must be satisfied each year before the insurance company pays on any medical claims. The single deductible for an individual must be a minimum of $1,050 and can be any deductible up to the maximum out-of-pocket limit of $5,250 and the single deductible for a family must be at least $2,100 up to the maximum out-of-pocket limit of $10,500 for the year 2006.”

I’m so glad Bush & Co. are making sure to cover the insurance companies. Too bad they’re not as interested in making sure that actual health care gets covered. Gosh, combined with the Medicare Drug Plan windfall for pharmaceutical and insurance companies, this President is really doing great things for corporate America… As usual, at the expense of the American people.