A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that out of all the people with job related health insurance, only 4 percent are enrolled in an HSA qualified plan.
“We don’t know yet whether workers and employers ultimately will embrace consumer-driven health plans in big numbers, but it certainly hasn’t been a tidal wave,” study co-author Gary Claxton, a Kaiser Family Foundation vice president, said.
The problem with this survey is that it focuses on employer provided health insurance. Health insurance isn’t nearly as likely to be “consumer driven” when the employer is picking up most of the cost of the premium.
In Colorado, employers are not allowed to cover any portion of the premium of an individual plan so there isn’t any incentive to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions. Therefore, anybody in Colorado with an individual health insurance plan is paying the entire premium themselves. At Insurance Shoppers, about 38 percent of our Colorado individual health insurance clients have chosen to enroll in an HSA qualified plan.
So, while HSA qualified plans may not help the uninsured; they certainly have grown in popularity as a solution to make health insurance premiums more affordable to those incurring all of their own insurance costs.
