My girlfriend uses a HSA for her prescription medications. It doesn’t look like the changes will really affect her. It was nice knowing that if there was money left over we could burn it on tums and aspirin, and I do feel the ban on OTC medications with HSA is a bad change; there are a lot of extremely helpful OTC medications out there, many of which arguably are part of “preventative medicine” and we should be encouraging people to use. Still, HSAs were never really intended as a way for people to dodge paying taxes with common household expenditures.
I’m not a huge fan of mandatory health insurance. I personally think we should have paid for these important reforms the way we pay for wars: income taxes. Health spending benefits the overall population more than bombs and guns do, and health issues kill way more Americans each year than terrorists could ever hope to.
I also think the excise tax on high cost health plans will lead directly to the thresholds being the exact amount of coverage employers provide. As a revenue stream it will be useless. As a cost-control method, it might be effective in creating a more level playing field. Or, it could hit the consumer with more out of pocket costs.
