Health Savings Accounts and the Future of American Health Care

Richard L. Kaplan:This article examines the recent enactment of Health Savings Accounts (HSA) as they might affect how Americans obtain coverage for their health care expenses and the role that personal responsibility will play in that process. It explains the historical development of this country’s tying health insurance to current employment status and especially the role of tax policy in that phenomenon. After considering the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, the article analyzes the key elements of the 2003 legislation that created HSAs. This part examines the high deductible insurance plan that must accompany an HSA, including its limit on out-of-pocket expenditures and the scope of additional insurance permitted.

Hybrid Car Design Battles

Norihiko Shirouzo & Jathon Sapsford:

A battle for power and influence is under way in the auto industry, as the basic technology under the hoods of mass-market cars goes up for grabs for the first time in nearly a century.
Amid soaring gasoline prices, car makers are rushing to use hybrid engines, which boost fuel efficiency by combining a traditional gasoline motor with an electric one. The result is a race among the world’s automotive giants that — like the VHS vs. Betamax brawl in the early days of videocassettes — could redraw the industry’s hierarchy and system of alliances for years to come.

1958 Edward R. Murrow Speech

Edward R. Murrow:

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER.

via Xeni

Part-Time Entrepreneurs: www.cmbsweets.com

Stephen Grocer:

Carolina Braunschweig, 28, worked as a reporter covering the venture-capital industry for Thomson Corp. in San Francisco. During that period, she also began contemplating the direction of her career and considering ways to supplement her modest reporter salary.

Ms. Braunschweig launched cmbsweets in June 2004, selling jams over the Internet at cmbsweets.com. Today her product line, which includes strawberry, boysenberry and olallieberry jams and apple-honey butter, is also sold in stores in New York, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area.