Obviously, indemnity insurance is the best available method of protecting your freedom to make your own medical choices and have access to the widest range of medical options. Unfortunately, low-deductible indemnity insurance plans with high UCR percentiles, relatively low co-payments and low ceilings on patient out-of-pocket expenses have a major drawback. Since they provide really good medical expense coverage, they are very expensive --- so expensive, in fact, that they are unaffordable for much of the population. One method of having indemnity insurance while keeping the cost down is to increase the policy's deductible --- a very commonly applied tactic in auto and other forms of insurance. Drawing on studies done during the health care crisis that showed that every dollar of medical insurance purchased actually cost the buyer a dollar and twenty-five cents, policy analysts reasoned that medical insurance costs could be cut significantly by self-insuring as much as possible. Of course, the risk of this is that a medical catastrophe could wipe out the self-insurer, so the amount of self-insurance had to be limited to the maximum the self-insurer could afford to lose --- a significant hindrance to many people.

The proposed solution to this quandary was to combine high-deductible indemnity insurance with a Medical Savings Account (MSA) to keep the cost of health care under control while maintaining the freedom to select the physician and type of care that suits you best.

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