The Man Who Invented the HSA Thinks We're Still Doing Healthcare All Wrong

What if the most powerful tax-advantaged account in your financial life was designed by one economist with a better idea, and the full version of that idea was never actually implemented?

You've probably heard of the Health Savings Account. You may even have one. But the man who invented it says the version Congress passed is a watered-down shadow of what it could be. And that's just the beginning of what's broken.

In this episode, Larry Kotlikoff sits down with Dr. John Goodman, the Wall Street Journal's "father of HSAs," author of 16 books, Bill Buckley's primetime debate partner, and one of the four most influential figures in post-war American healthcare policy. This is a high value conversation between two economists who've spent careers trying to fix the same broken system with notably different tools.

What You'll Learn:

• [00:09:06] The HSA origin story — how a Cato Institute assignment in 1990 produced the idea now powering 37 million accounts, and why every special interest in Washington opposed it
• [00:10:13] The design flaw Congress built in from day one — and what a "Roth HSA" would actually look like
• [00:19:16] Why Medicaid patients visit the ER 40% more after enrolling — and the HSA-based fix that hospital lobbyists killed before it got a hearing
• [00:34:43] The LASIK principle — why cosmetic surgery gets cheaper and better every year while everything else in medicine doesn't, and what that tells us about markets
• [00:36:24] The California reference pricing experiment — how one insurer drove hip replacement costs from $100,000 down to $30,000 statewide in just over a year
• [00:44:51] Why your employer plan was designed, possibly by accident, to attract healthy people and repel sick ones
• [00:21:17] The Columbia dissertation that caused a near-riot — Goodman's economic theory of democratic decision-making that predicted exactly why healthcare reform is nearly impossible
• [00:50:33] The Social Security and Medicare crisis Congress discusses privately but won't touch publicly — and why seniors must see something in it for themselves before any reform can happen

Featured Guest:

Dr. John Goodman is president and CEO of the Goodman Institute and Senior Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is credited by the Wall Street Journal as the father of Health Savings Accounts and one of the four most influential figures in post-war American healthcare. Author of 16 books including Priceless and Patient Power (300,000 copies sold), he appeared approximately two dozen times as Bill Buckley's debate partner on PBS Firing Line.

Resources Mentioned:

• Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis: amazon.com
• Patient Power: amazon.com
• A Better Choice: Healthcare Solutions for America: amazon.com
• The Goodman Institute: goodmaninstitute.org
• Full John Goodman book catalog: amazon.com/author
• Economics Matters Substack: larrykotlikoff.economicsmatters.com

Economics Matters: The Podcast is hosted by Larry Kotlikoff, Professor of Economics at Boston University.

Disclaimer: Any opinions expressed on Economics Matters’ episodes are those of the authors and guests. These are not the opinions of Boston University or Economic Security Planning, Inc.