The Health Shopper

Wal-Mart, the largest U.S. retailer, is joining CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid to open more "walk-in clinics" in their stores. But in Illinois, the doctors the stores are competing with are demanding government regulation to stop the clinic explosion.

As reported in this week's Financial Times:

The state could be the first to impose stricter regulation on the new generation of walk-in clinics, where nurse-practitioners can examine patients, conduct basic procedures such as inoculation, and prescribe for minor illnesses, while charging less than a doctor’s practice.

Hopefully government regulation won't impede the growth of these viable alternatives to high-priced doctor's visits. The reason walk-in clinics are catching on so fast is that health consumers prefer them. They're convenient and cheap.

Hal Rosenbluth, chairman of clinic company Take Care and head of the industry group Convenient Care Association, told the Financial Times that pushback against the clinics validates their existence.

“That’s what people are clamouring for – they want healthcare on their terms not the system’s,” he said, adding that the push for regulation is anti-change “turf protection.”

The New York Times recently ran a Q&A with Barbara Weltman, a lawyer and small-business specialist in Millwood, N.Y., who has written books on small businesses, including J. K. Lasser’s Small Business Taxes 2007 and J. K. Lasser’s Finance and Tax for Your Family Business. She had some interesting things to say about health insurance benefits, including an estimate of how much businesses can save on health insurance if they make maximum contributions to Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). This is an issue that Vimo brought up in its HSA funding report earlier this year. If companies make maximum contributions to employees' HSAs, millions can be saved in health-care expenditures. Given this, it should be no surprise that HSAs are catching on with small businesses, although not as quickly as they should be. Here's an excerpt from the interview with Weltman:

Q. How are small businesses addressing the problem of providing health insurance?

A. Health savings accounts are growing in popularity. They go hand in hand with high-deductible health insurance plans. The minimum deductible amount changes every year. This year it is $1,100 for an individual or $2,200 for a family. A company with 15 employees can save 40 percent over a traditional policy if they make the maximum contribution. By law, either the company or the employee can make contributions to the savings account, or they can split the contributions. …

Small businesses can offer their employees affordable group health insurance that offers big ticket benefits, simply by HSA-empowering their health plans. Visit Vimo's HSA comparison-shopping engine to find the HSA that's right for your firm.

Vimo won two honors in Las Vegas this month at the Consumer Directed Health Care Conference (CDHCC) Awards. Our "comparison shopping for surgery" service was named Best Use of Technology to Promote Patient Care by the National Wellness, Prevention & Fitness Conference (NWPFC), which held its awards ceremony concurrently with the CDHCC.

One award we netted that hasn't received quite as much attention was the second place award from the CDHCC for Best Initiative for Cost Transparency. What a lot of people don't realize is that there actually wasn't a first place award given to anyone in this category. The CDHCC's awards system is structured so that if no one receives enough points in a category, there is no first place award. So, in essence, we were first in class here too.

Another conference held concurrently with the CDHCC was the Inaugural International Medical Tourism Conference, featuring information about companies like MedicalTourism.com and IndusHealth.com. I learned that the U.S. is expecting major shortages of hundreds of thousands of nurses and tens of thousands doctors in the coming years, developments that sound scary for prices in the U.S.

Both IndusHealth.com (which focuses on providing Americans with access to health options in India) and MedicalToursim.com are providing a viable alternative to high prices in the U.S. They let Americans save tens of thousands of dollars by hopping on a plane and having an operation performed overseas.

There were four conferences taking place in the same place: CDHCC; National Wellness, Prevention and Fitness; Consumer Direct Access to Health & Retailization; and the International Medical Tourism Conference. While they covered different topics, they all addressed the subject of price transparency, something that is rapidly changing the overall marketplace and is an integral part of Vimo's mission.

They're very, very easy. I just had my first experience buying a proton-pump-inhibitor with an HSA check last week and it was basically as easy as buying drugs at a pharmacy with any check. Only better, because you don't feel it in your personal checking account.

For those of you still unaware of what an HSA is, the letters stand for "Health Savings Account." I opened an HSA after joining the health plan at the company I work for — Vimo — and untaxed money is automatically placed into my HSA account by payroll. Because you're hit with a tax penalty if you pull the money out for anything other than health-related expenses, you're not going to spend the money unless you use it to pay for medicine or a medical expense, so the experience of buying drugs is pretty surreal: It's basically like you're buying something for free. There's no copay, even for expensive for name-brand medications.

It's this kind of experience that more Americans could have — if small businesses were more aware of the benefits that HSAs offer their employees. Unfortunately, not many employers are doing this.

A January Vimo Report reveals a significant gap between the number of people enrolled in high deductible health plans and the number of people that hold a Health Savings Account. The report also shows that funds on deposit in the average HSA are roughly half of what is required to cover the typical health plan deductible for these consumers. The low average balance nationwide would seem to point towards a general trend of low (or no) HSA contributions from employers.

If you're an employer, you can make the lives of your employees much easier — and save them plenty of tax dollars — by purchasing the appropriate group health insurance policy and then funding your employees' HSAs. You can also shop for HSAs for your employees at Vimo's HSA page and speak to a broker for information about finding an affordable health insurance plan that qualifies you for an HSA.

Some people have responded to the soaring prices of drugs and healthcare by purchasing "pirate" pharamaceuticals. But as this New York Times story demonstrates, trying to cut back on health-care costs by purchasing imported, non-FDA-approved products can be fraught with major health risks. "In China, the government is vowing to clean up its pharmaceutical industry, in part because of criticism over counterfeit drugs flooding the world markets. In December, two top drug regulators were arrested on charges of taking bribes to approve drugs. In addition, 440 counterfeiting operations were closed down last year, the World Health Organization said."

The best way to save money on healthcare is to adopt a consumer-driven health care (CDHC) approach, involving an affordable health insurance plan and a Health Savings Account (HSA).