March Naked For Health Savings Accounts

On the Tweet Deck this morning I noticed a comment by @sheldonM regarding HSAbureaucracy.  While there is a pretty good chance me and Mr. M. would not see eye-to-eye on the general direction of health care, he did make a comment on which we could find some agreement.  He was lamenting the bureaucracy associated with his health savings account.  Specifically the cost of time associated with administering ones health care extrapolated across the population.  Now he didn’t say this but I would agree that health care administration overall represents an outrageous and insulting amount of personal and professional time for us and extreme costs fo them.

Certainly the development of high deductible health plans and HSAs have not reduced wasted time, however I don’t think this is a function of the existence of these products.  From an insurance perspective, I have had it both ways.  I lived with an HMO for years before switching to an HDHP.  I can state from personal experience, the time I spent screwing around with my insurance company related to the HMO vs. the time I spend screwing around with my insurance company related to my HDHP is a wash.  Each type of plan had its own nuances which led to frustrating wastes of time dealing with the insurance company du jour.

The problem, in one person’s opinion, in not generally the plan itself, but how the insurance companies administer the plans.  Communications between the doctors, hospitals, insurance companiesis a joke regardless of the type of plan.  The insurance companies treat customers as their enemies as opposed to their allies.  As the owner of an HDHP who pays 100% of my insurance premium, this especially frosts my goodies.  I’m the customer for goodness sake.

Why can’t sheldon and I simply go into the doctor, get our discount for services at the point of sale, Know exactly what the cost is going to be, pay the tab and be done with it?  Why do we not know what it is going to cost us for the services rendered until much later.  Why must we wait around for weeks and weeks for some mystery turd to show up in our respective mail boxes and then be faced with figuring out how we will pay the doctor’s bill, which likely we will not be able to decipher?

If we can put a man on the moon, blah, blah, blah……

This is but one example of gross and dehumanizing inefficiency in the health care system.  Keep peeling this onion and you can cry me a river.

So what can you do about it?  Be like sheldonM and make noise.  Write your congressman.  Call your favorite talk radio host.  Send a letter to the editor. Blog. Tweet. Start a revolution on FaceBook, MySpace.  March on Washington.  March on your insurance company.  March naked around your yard.   Do what it takes to get noticed.  But don’t wait ’til March.  Turn a collective yawn into a collective roar.   Simple.