Health Savings Accounts

This book further expands the hidden advantages of Health Savings Accounts (HSA), which the author had a hand in creating in 1981, along with John McClaughry of Vermont when John was Senior Policy Advisor in the Reagan White House. Temporarily skipping a confrontation with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for lack of certainty about where it stands, we expand the horizon to lifetime health insurance, and discover that Medicare poses the most important obstacle. HSAs had more advantages than we had realized, but Medicare poses more issues.

The simplicity of HSAs provides excellent avenues for gradual transition to new programs, plus an easy escape hatch if they fail. Beads on a string, as it were, with a common healthcare-and-retirement fund, as a unified incentive for savings in both programs.