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America’s working families are facing a crisis in health care: Health care costs are rising three times the rate of inflation. As a result, employers are shifting more health care costs onto workers—or simply dropping health coverage all together. Already, 46 million Americans have no health insurance.

President George W. Bush’s answer to the health care crisis—individual Health Savings Accounts (HSAs)—will end up costing consumers more money and providing less health care.

HSAs require high out-of-pocket expenses—a minimum of a $2,000 deductible for a family, but as high as $10,000 in some cases—before workers’ coverage actually kicks in. As a result, many workers and their families are likely to go without critical health care or delay seeking needed care.

HSAs encourage employers to abandon health benefits, so cost-shifting will grow. They do nothing to solve the huge problem of cost-shifting from such irresponsible employers as Wal-Mart to employers that do fund health care for working families.

HSA plans will discourage preventive care, ultimately increasing the cost of health care in the United States.

Workers who remain in more comprehensive coverage plans will see their premiums increase as younger and healthier workers opt for the high-deductible HSAs.

Under the HSA plan, older and less healthy employees would be pooled together in a higher-risk group and insurers would raise premiums.

As employers face higher premiums for traditional employer group health plans, employers would be more likely to shift even more costs to workers or drop traditional health coverage all together in favor of high-deductible HSAs.

Most uninsured Americans could not save large amounts of money to put into HSAs. Because most low-income people have little disposable income after paying for housing, food and other necessities, it is unlikely they could manage to spare $1,000 (or much more, in some cases) to put into an HSA. And many uninsured don’t even have enough income to see any benefits from the tax breaks.

Racial and ethnic minorities suffer disproportionately from chronic conditions and are so less likely to benefit from HSAs. For example, African Americans and Latinos are twice as likely to suffer from diabetes as whites. Because racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to have acute or chronic conditions and are more likely to be low income, they are far less likely to benefit from HSAs and far more likely to be harmed by high deductibles.

Bush’s HSA plan actually could increase the number of Americans without health insurance. A recent analysis by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber estimated as many as 350,000 people currently insured at work would lose their coverage as employers used the new accounts as reasons to op coverage.

HSAs would undermine employer-sponsored group insurance—the backbone of health care financing in the United States.

The HSA Council is one of the big supporters of health savings accounts. Its efforts to promote HSAs are similar to those by the financial services industry to promote Social Security privatization, which sought financial backing from Wall Street firms.

The Social Security privatization backer then funneled funding through industry front groups such as the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security and the Coalition for American Financial Security.