Bigger Paychecks.(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Health Care: President Bush's proposed expansion of Health Savings Accounts will help control health care costs, most economists agree. But HSAs will have another beneficial impact by boosting Americans' pay.

Americans spent an estimated $2 trillion, or roughly 16% of GDP, on health care last year. And the bill keeps getting bigger. Indeed, in recent decades, health-care outlays have grown twice as fast as inflation. Many Americans -- about 46 million at last official count -- no longer have health insurance.

No question about it: Health-care costs are a rising burden, for both workers and companies.

Against this backdrop, the modest HSA program that Bush created last year might not seem like much. But in fact, it's been a stunning success. In just 10 months, the number of participants in HSAs more than trebled to nearly 3 million, according to America's Health Insurance Plans, a national trade group.

People are catching on that the money they save in HSAs, if not spent on health care, is theirs to keep. It's a classic win-win: Workers save more, while the health-care market benefits from savvier consumers actually watching what they spend. It's the exact opposite of the third-party insurance system we have today.

But there's another advantage, one that gets little discussion: higher wages. An increasing chunk of workers' paychecks is being gobbled up by health-care costs. HSAs, by getting consumers involved in making choices about health care, will help curb those costs.

That should leave more money in workers' pockets -- reversing a three-decade trend of health-care costs gobbling up wage gains. The trend was on display again Tuesday, as new government data on wages and benefits showed the pace of growth for benefits -- 4.5% in the fourth quarter -- far outstripping the much-smaller 2.6% rise in wages.