HSA dilemma

My husband and I will not even celebrate our first anniversary until July 2013, but we have already spent a considerable amount of time researching health care and health plans in order to determine the wisest course of action for our little family.  After much researching, we discovered a plan with a great fit for us: a plan with low monthly premium payments, a high deductible, and a health savings account.  His employer would even match up to $600 of deposits that we make into the HSA each year (so you can bet we are depositing exactly $600 a year!).  Yet after all of the hard work that we put into discovering such an account, the odds of his company continuing to offer a high deductible health savings plan once Obamacare goes into effect are low.  I could not have been more frustrated as I began to read article after article detailing the extra costs that will be forced upon HSA plans.

Both my husband and I are relatively healthy and maybe visit the doctor for one sinus infection a year.  He wears glasses, and I have dental implants.  Though at some point we hope to start a family, that will likely not happen until he is further along in his graduate studies program.  We pretty much only have health insurance as a precautionary measure.  We hope never to have to use it, but in the event of a broken bone or other more serious illness, it will keep us from financial ruin. 

Picture from: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1413663

Since we will rarely meet even the lowest deductible each year, the best way for us to save money on health insurance was by reducing our monthly costs.  We raised our deductible and opened an HSA.  We had been planning to set aside money in a savings account to use when we do being trying to have children, but the HSA allowed us to do so with pre-tax income.  The money that we deposit is also matched by his employer, so we felt that we were getting $600 free each year!  Since we know that we will inevitably have some sort of health care cost one day, we have money set aside to help us-money that we never really saw and never really felt leave our pockets.  Since the monthly premium payments were so much lower with our new higher deductible, we just applied what we were saving directly to the HSA.  We never noticed a difference in his paychecks!  (Well, that’s not totally true: we did notice a difference, but it was related to higher tax rates, not the change in health plans.  Ugh!)

I have been so disheartened as I have read article after article detailing how the required “minimum actuarial value” for all health plans under Obamacare will make HSA plans impractical for most providers to continue to offer.  The minimum actuarial value that is being imposed essentially says that the insurance provider must cover a minimum of 60 percent of their clients’ healthcare costs.  Since the monies that we (and our employers) contribute to the HSA do not count toward this minimum, it will be hard for them to appear to meet the minimum without providing a lot of other services that would raise our monthly rate.

Will there be any option for a healthy person who truly only needs to be covered in case of an emergency?  I surely hope and pray that we will still be able to afford health insurance.  In order for that to be possible, we still need the option of a higher deductible and a lower monthly premium.  

Let me know if your research has uncovered any such plans that I am missing!