What would happen if large firms offered MSAs?

This paper reports the results of a survey of more than 500 health benefit specialists about the advice they would give to medium-size and large emplo yers on offering a tax-advantaged medical savings account (MSA), About 42 p ercent of respondents would recommend an MSA combined with a catastrophic h ealth plan, while a third would advise against such a plan. When presented with a specific ex ample of an MSA package that would be attractive to a la rge fraction of workers, the percentage of benefit specialists favoring add ing an MSA option rose to 74 percent. However, respondents generally did no t believe that most workers would choose the MSA, especially if the alterna tive were a health maintenance organization (HMO).