Given my beat around here, I should link to Tyler Cowen's post on Health Savings Accounts. Then nickel version is he can imagine some upsides, particularly for the rich and the healthy, but doesn't see much evidence for the idea that HSAs are an answer to our system's woes, or the single policy we should implement if given access to a one-wish health care genie. He also links to Jason Furman's paper on smart cost-sharing (which you can find more readably summarized in this article by, ahem, me) which reminds me of something I meant to write in response to some of the commenters on the caviar post from a few days back. Wisewon, articulating a fair criticism, replied, "Someone has to make a decision on when to restrict access to medical care. You seem to be arguing that patients aren't capable of making that decision in the context of their specific situation, and instead would prefer a governing body to do it at a population-level with no information on individual circumstances." Basically, yes, that's exactly what I'm arguing. But in general, the choices on this front are too limited. Either you're for the conservative vision, wherein everything is simply priced at marginal cost + provider profits and people buy what they can afford and forgo whatever treatment is of their price range (stupid from a health perspective, and also cruel), or you have some central bureaucracy that stamps every care request with a blue "eye" or a red "nay," which few want and wouldn't be sustainable in this country anyway.
