Among the “controversial” provisions Democrats are refusing to accept in a health-insurance reform bill are medical savings accounts.
Democrats have charged that MSAs — basically, health care IRAs — are a sop to the rich that shouldn’t be included in the bill. Senate minority leader Tom Daschle described them as “the Dr. Kevorkians of health reform.” House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt charged Republicans with inserting ” poisonous provisions that would doom the bill’s chance of becoming law.”
Interesting. In 1992, Daschle was one of six sponsors of a bill that featured medical savings accounts. He hailed them (in a “Dear Colleague” letter) for giving consumers “an incentive to monitor spending carefully because to do otherwise would be wasting their “own” money.” And in 1994, all but one Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee voted to include MSAs in the Clinton health care plan, and in a television interview Gephardt described them as “a great option.”
Great, that is, until they became an issue for Republicans, at which point they became “poisonous.”
