FSA’s are part of traditional Section 125 plans. An econ prof at Michigan State came up with the idea of HSA–somethng about if you, sick guy, interact with your doctor you’ll get a better, fairer $ for your treatement. George Bush, the worst president in our history, loves the idea,

Many small to mid-sized businesses are trying it. Mitch Harper ran interesting posts about it (basically, employees are asking employers for help in trying to find out how much healthcare costs).

The Canadians are right.

Yes, they’re stuffy and dour. But having managed benefits in southeast Michigan, and hired Canadians baffled when signing up for US health benefits, I can say they’ve nailed it on the head.

Our benefits are too complicated, no one wants to figure out what out-of-pocket and reasonable-and-customary mean.

The old ‘Flexible Spending Accounts’ always bothered me – with that “use it or lose it” feature; we always low-balled it, so as to be sure and use it…but then if you broke your eyeglasses in the middle of the year and needed to spend a couple hundred dollars, then you had to use old-fashioned ‘after-tax’ dollars.

But the HSA is a Health Savings Account (as opposed to ‘spending’ account, as Madame Telling Tales called it) and you can keep it year-to-year, and even grow it (my boss piles as much into there as he can, on to pay for all the medicine he’ll no doubt need when he’s an aged retiree).

Our employer provides high-deductible health insurance, so the idea is that you amass at least the deductible amount in your HSA. As a further inducement to good stewardship of these things, our employer also makes a contribution to the HSA each year, so if you progress through a year without anything major, and just the normal stuff (we are also doing the orthodontist thing, along with all the ususal stuff like glasses and the occasional fever-that-requires-the-pink-stuff, etc), then without much paycheck pain the account will begin to accumulate.

It’s not like the good ‘ole pre-ERISA days when companies misused pension funds.

As a former benefits geek, I hate FSAs. Good idea/dumb execution. Savvy, organized people know how to use it. Others lose thousands of dollars they can’t afford.

Any college student who’s taken Civilization 101 knows how to build a viable culture. You begin with rule of law and industry, clarifying the first and expanding the second until it generates a tax base that is able to support your hobbies.

And leaving aside quibbling that “viable culture” REALLY begins with agricultural success, I agree. But then we get whiplash when our law-and-order barkeep says

The indictments against Kelty are the latest manifestations of this town’s collectively immature psychology, its sense of adolescent resentment and pernicious masochism.

What happened to Rule of Law? It may well be ‘immature psychology’ to stuff $150,000 borrowed from one secretive rich guy into your checking account, and then put it into your campaign funds as your own money, and then lie to a grand jury about it…but more importantly, anyone who would do this is also a criminal.

Is it more ‘maschistic’ to recognize this simple truth, or to go into full denial and run a campaign on the Persecuted Martyr platform?