An uncertain cure

WASHINGTON — Two years after they became legal, President Bush has begun to champion health savings accounts as a salve for the nation’s ailing health care system. But early studies of HSAs — and the early experiences of a small but growing number of people who are trying them — do not match the White House’s certainty that this recent concept in health insurance is, as Bush put it recently, “good for you.”

Health savings accounts differ sharply from traditional insurance by requiring people to pay more of their own medical expenses in exchange for significant tax benefits if they set aside money for that purpose. The arrangement consists of two parts: an insurance policy — less expensive than most ordinary health plans — in which people pay at least a few thousand dollars up front before the coverage begins, combined with a special investment account into which they and sometimes their employers may save money tax-free for current or future medical expenses.

According to the White House and other proponents, the plans can tame medical costs, turn patients into smarter medical consumers and make insurance affordable for more people. HSAs, however, remain so new and rare that there is little evidence on whether they curb overall health care expenditures or overuse of care. Meanwhile, research hints that they are most appealing to people who are relatively affluent, not poor and uninsured.

Mixed results

Some people who have switched to the plans are delighted. “So far, it’s been very, very good for myself and my family,” said Daniel Reisfield, 47, a Wall Street headhunter who lives in San Diego with his wife and two children. Reisfield said he thinks it makes more sense to invest more than $5,000 a year in mutual funds through his HSA than to pay a large insurance premium for his healthy family, which rarely seeks medical care.

Others have been disenchanted quickly. Felix Meschke, 32, a business professor at the University of Minnesota, did careful calculations before he, too, switched his family to an HSA. Less than two weeks later, his 11-month-old son, Jason, developed an ear infection that became so worrisome a pediatrician sent him to a hospital, where he stayed for two days. Meschke faced a $3,700 bill. If he still had his old insurance, he would have owed a few hundred dollars.

The uneven, uncertain impact of HSAs on the broader landscape of health care can be glimpsed at Wendy’s International Inc. The fast-food chain has moved aggressively to switch to health savings plans. Last year, Wendy’s eliminated its old insurance plan for about 9,000 managers and administrators and offered them only an HSA instead. The company has not offered such a plan to its hamburger cooks and the rest of its front-line crew, most of whom do not work enough hours to qualify for health insurance — and tend not to buy it, even if they qualify.

Jeffrey Cava, Wendy’s executive vice president of human resources and administration, said although insurance premiums for its HSAs rose much less than the company’s old insurance would have done, Wendy’s still spent more money overall on health benefits during its first year with health savings accounts than the year before.

The firm has brought in consultants to explore whether the switch will turn its workers into more careful medical consumers. “I am cautiously optimistic,” Cava said.

Urged on by business, the banking industry and conservatives in Congress, the White House is defining HSAs as part of what Bush has called an “ownership society” that shifts responsibility — and, critics say, risk — from government and employers to individuals. Critics say HSAs mainly provide a tax break for people with good incomes and health, and create a dangerous ripple effect in which traditional insurance eventually would cost more for everyone else.

During the past two years, about 3 million Americans, out of 170 million with private insurance, have started to try them, according to insurance industry figures. Unlike Wendy’s, most of the big employers that are trying HSAs offer them as one alternative, and they are much less popular.

At the defense contractor Raytheon Co., for instance, about 1,000 of its 67,000 workers picked an HSA when the accounts became available at the beginning of this year. Rose Umile, senior manager of employee benefits, said the company offers to chip in about a third of the contributions to the health accounts, is fully covering preventive care and encourages employees to think of the plans as a way to get a head start on saving money for medical care once they retire. The result, Umile said, was that “higher-paid employees purchased it.”

When Impinj Inc., a semiconductor company based in Seattle, offered HSAs a year ago, Autumn West tried one. Last month, she returned to a traditional health plan. A 30-year-old single mother with a salary of about $60,000 as a human resources assistant, West uses more than $500 a month worth of medicine for severe allergies and asthma and needs treatments that her HSA plan counted as surgery, requiring her to pay a larger share. Several of West’s co-workers at Impinj are happier with their new HSAs. One of them, Magdalene Adenau, who is 29 and single, ended last year with about $700 left in her health account. And when she needed a chiropractor, she went to one who charged about $60 until she shopped around and found one who charged about $30.

“There’s a real benefit to you if you use the money smartly,” Adenau said.

But when his son was hospitalized, said Meschke, the Minnesota professor, “I realized that I neither had the bargaining power nor mental capacity” to influence the price of Jason’s chest X-rays, intravenous fluids or antibiotics. The hospital staff he asked about the charges had no idea, he said, “and you are kind of overwhelmed with the medical aspects of this. If you’re negotiating a car, you can always say, ‘I’ll walk off the lot.’ If your 1-year-old kid has an I-V in his arm, you don’t have the same situation.”