The rest of the story

I've mentioned consumer directed health plans in passing recently. If you want to learn more about the intricacies of the health insurance market, have a look at InsureBlog, which recently posted a series of articles on HSAs and HRAs. (The intro is here.)One of the intriguing aspects of the consumer directed health plan movement is that while a lot of the talk has been about Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), which offer employees the ability to build up savings over time, employers have mainly offered Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs), which are more limited from the employee perspective although they often lead to lower out-of-pocket costs.A drawback to today's consumer directed plans is the lack of cost and quality information about providers. That's changing, but slower than it should.