Health

A Prescription for Medicare Disaster

Suppose you're just turning 65 and you want to make sure that you have prescription drug coverage in addition to Medicare. You have four possibilities...
Saving Medicare

Although public attention is focused on how to solve the problem of Social Security, the future financial problems of Medicare are twice as great.

Real Patient Protection: Expanding Medical Savings Accounts

In 1996 Congress created a demonstration project permitting small employers and the self-employed to establish up to 750,000 tax-free Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs). However, as a result of oppositio…
Medical Savings Accounts: Obstacles to Their Growth and Ways to Improve Them

Why have MSAs been slow to catch on? How can their use be increased? Lawmakers imposed a number of restrictions that limit who can purchase MSAs and thwart the ability of MSAs to work properly.
Patient Protection Accounts: Personal, Portable and Affordable

Although tax law generously subsidizes the employer payment of third-party health insurance premiums, it provides virtually no tax relief to those who pay medical bills directly. Thus the tax law enco…
Answering the Critics of Medicare Private Contracting

A National Public Radio story on William Delashmit, 72, recently highlighted the problem of Medicare private contracting. Delashmit suffers from Cogan's dystrophy, an abnormality of the cornea that ha…
Health Plan for the GOP

House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Archer (R-Texas) has proposed giving tax deductions to people who purchase their own health insurance. House Health Subcommittee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) has…
10 Guidelines for Insuring Children

The 1997 budget agreement includes a provision giving the states $24 billion over five years to provide health insurance to uninsured children from low-income families - basically those in families wi…