Meet the Press interviews during 2015: on Health Care

Ben Carson: Replace need for Medicare with HSAs & catastrophic insurance

A: No. The system that I would put in place would largely negate the need for Medicare or Medicaid. I'm not talking about getting rid of those programs. We'll make health savings accounts available to people from the day that they are born to the day that they die, at which time they can pass it on to their family. We pay for it with the same dollars that we pay for our health care with. We give people the ability to shift money within their HSA within their family. If you're $500 short, your wife can give it to you out of hers. It gives you flexibility without a middleman. That'll take care of the largest number of incidents. It doesn't take care of catastrophic health care. But you can buy a catastrophic health care policy. And it's going to cost you a lot less because the only thing coming out of your catastrophic insurance is real catastrophic health care.