THE ACCIDENTAL ARGUMENT FOR HSA'S:

Capitalist Health Insurance for All (Terry J. Allen, 9/15/09, In These Times)

[M]ost U.S. Fortune 500 companies wouldn’t touch private insurance with a 10-foot colonoscope.

When they need to insure their financial health against fire, terrorism, and liability lawsuits sparked by defective products and polluting factories that kill people, they don’t call State Farm. Instead, corporations routinely insure themselves by creating a “captive” insurance company as a wholly-owned subsidiary. “The parent company is insuring its own risk,” says Sandy Bigglestone, of Vermont’s Captive Insurance division.

But when we the people need health insurance against the high cost of staying alive, we, or our employers, pay private insurers—corporations that are more devoted to protecting their profits than our health. The premiums we pay go not only for our pills and treatments, but also for lobbyists (on whom the health insurance industry currently spends $1.4 million per day for the U.S. Congress alone), campaign contributions, stratospheric executive salaries, private jets, lawyers hired to fight legitimate claims, and, of course, profits.

Captive insurance cuts costs, first, by saving all the money an outside private insurer would take as profit. [...]

Captives also save administrative costs, since they have “an incentive to do business efficiently” because “it’s eventually coming out of the same pockets,” Dennis Harwick, president of the Captive Insurance Companies Association, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. On top of that, captive insurance companies rake in tax breaks by deducting from their profits the money they are required to reserve for payout­­—even if they never have to pay it out.

Bingo! Sensible health care reform would give every American captive self insurance.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 15, 2009 7:34 AM