Dr. Carson has some great insight, however, his proposed healthcare plan only works if everyone is able to work and only gets sick in a linear fashion with age. Thousands of children and parents of children with leukemia would be out of luck after a week of treatment. And I suppose it would rule out death panels, because once an elderly patient on biweekly dialysis runs out of money in their health savings plan, they'd have run out of money to live. So either we make exceptions or we let anyone that gets "too sick" to die. But then if we make exceptions (like the government putting money into their HSA), then there will be "treatment panels" that decide if you are sick enough to meet the requirements to receive the benefits of that exception. Of course, you could allow patients the right to also purchase supplementary insurance, but as 90% of people already pay more in to insurance than they get out of it, there would be no profitable or affordable market for it. The worst part of his plan, though, is that you just can't give people the ability to manage the way their healthcare dollars are spent. Not because you don't want them to have that power, but because 99% of the public is unaware of how to handle it. So if someone's fund is low and they get a stomach ache, they may say, "Well I'll just wait it out," until they get a GI perforation from their chronic NSAID use that they've been taking to avoid the cost of a doctor and proper pain medication, then end up in trauma surgery. On the other end of the spectrum, most people don't understand the root cause of their conditions. So if a patient does present with a stomach ache and the doctor says "You've been taking too much medicine, wait it out," the patient is likely to disagree and just go to another doctor that will prescribe him "the right medicine."
