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In fact, in 1996 the Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, legislation that made MSAs a legitimate tax-favored insurance product — if only on a limited, experimental basis. While Congress put a cap of 750,000 MSA policies into the law, to date something around 100,000 have been sold. So far, the MSA experiment has largely been a flop.
Many Democrats are suspect of the MSA concept, believing that only the healthiest people will buy MSA plans thereby leaving other insurance plans with the burden of taking care of the sickest people. They argue that any insurance system has to be one that includes the largest pool of people possible where the sickest and the healthiest are together — the healthy offsetting the costs of the sick thereby creating a lower average cost for all.
During his presidential campaign, Steve Forbes seemed to have a “one-answer-fits-all” health policy solution. The single answer was medical savings accounts, or MSAs.
Many Republicans, including George W. Bush, John McCain and a number of Republican congressional leaders, point to MSAs as at least a partial solution to the problems of affordable access to healthcare and giving the patient/consumer more control over the healthcare system.