title: Families, dependencies, and the moral ground of health savings accounts.
abstract: Health Savings Accounts have been marginalized in the West. In Singapore, however, they are foundational to the financing of health care. In this brief essay, I shall begin to sketch a justification for Health Savings Accounts. The family has always been thought of as a mere prolegomena to the polis and to be primarily about securing the goods of material life: food, shelter, intimacy. I shall first explore the recent scientific literature on the communal nature of human thriving and follow it with a phenomenological account of human dependency. I shall claim that in securing the material means to sustain life, the family is also involved in the creation of the life-world of the child. That means that the bare necessities of life met in families are not merely about sustaining bodily life but are also part of the meaning-making aspects of life. The family then should have recourse to the material means of life-and-death decisions, because it is in these life-and-death decisions that the families' life-world of values is to be deployed.
authors.affiliation: Saint Louis University, 3545 Lafayette Ave, Salus Center, St Louis, MO 63104, USA. jbisho12@slu.edu
authors.forename: Jeffrey P
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Bishop
mesh_terms: D003256:Community Participation; D005260:Female; D005382:Financing, Personal / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D015438:Health Behavior; D006264:Health Benefit Plans, Employee / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006301:Health Services Needs and Demand / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D007348:Insurance, Health / Q000191:economics*; D008297:Male; D020402:Medical Savings Accounts / Q000941:ethics* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D009014:Morals; D012051:Reimbursement Mechanisms / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D012111:Residence Characteristics; D040841:Resource Allocation / Q000191:economics / Q000941:ethics* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D012846:Singapore; D012945:Social Values