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