Medicare law includes health savings accounts: tax shelter or access provider?(Practice Trends)

Whether the new health savings accounts included in the giant Medicare reform law are a good idea depends on whom you talk to.

If employers start offering the accounts, "it will segment the risks because the young, healthy people will take up [health savings accounts], leaving the older, sicker people in traditional employer-based coverage, which tends to have modest deductibles, modest copays, and comprehensive benefits," said Edwin Park, senior health policy analyst at the Washington-based Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal public policy organization.

"The costs [for traditional plans] would go up because they just had high-risk people, and that in turn would force employers to either drop traditional coverage entirely or pass on premium increases to employees," he said.

Not so, said Greg Scandlen, director of the Center for Consumer Driven Health Care at the Galen Institute, a conservative public policy group in Alexandria, Va.

"All that stuff is totally fallacious," he said. "There is absolutely no research that supports that contention." Instead, he said, large employers that have offered high-deductible plans similar to health savings accounts (HSAs) under a federally sanctioned demonstration program have found that there is no such division among people who sign up, although the people who chose the accounts tended to be slightly older and have more children.

With a health savings account, workers and employers can contribute up to $5,000 per individual and $10,000 per family (a minimum ...