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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

vision "insurance" isn't for reducing risk, it's actually a vehicle for delivering tax-free compensation by employers. since you're not paying income tax on the benefits, you're saving at least the marginal tax rate (~35% depending on the state). IANAL, but the arrangement might also cause no sales tax to be collected. also, your employer who's buying in bulk presumably gets a % discount over whatever rate the blog's quoting. in the end, i would be surprised if there wasn't a net savings.

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Most employers also wouldn't add their contribution towards vision insurance to your salary if you decline coverage. I'd decline several of my employment benefits in an instant if I could get the employer's contribution added to my salary somehow. But that is not the world we live in.

I could get a much better plan individually on the insurance market with just what my employer pays per month to our insurance trust. On the other hand, I’m also young - a lot of the employees in my company are middle aged or higher, so that contributes a lot to our costs, if I were older it would change a lot of things.

And this ultimately brings us to the reason why universal healthcare would be cheaper. Having our population of 300MM+ spread into so many different risk pools screws with financials of premiums a ton. Even with our aging population we’d be paying significantly less if the entire country was in a single risk pool.

This is true. I'm able to use my HSA account to purchase glasses from Zenni Optical though too.

Don't. Use LPFSA. Keep HSA for investment.

That only applies to people wealthy enough to cap out a HSA at $6750/year.

source?

On what part? People not having over $6750 spare each year or that being the HSAs cap?

For the 2016, 17, and 18 contribution limits see here https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pa...

What you said was lpfsa cannot be used without capping hsa, or something along those lines.

No what I said was that there's no value even having a FSA until you cap your HSA. An FSA is worse than a HSA by every metric, cannot invest it, lose it after twelve months, many lack a debit card (or charge), cannot increase or decrease it after open enrollments and so on.

Does california treat LPFSA similar to HSA?

I get a HDHP, put the savings from not paying high premiums into HSA. The problem with california is, this is treated as income, and capital gains/interests/dividends trigger income either way. Not that it'd matter, but i see your point about FSA coming after from HSA. IT's fair.

it's possible to save in LPFSA for some people. Either way, my insurance premium through my employer is pretty low, so it makes no sense to decline it.

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