I just got off the phone with an associate producer for Dateline NBC in New York. I feel a little bit blindsided: It's nearly quittin' time, it's been a long day and I gave up happy hours for Lent (among other things).

So I might have been a little off my game as the ambitious news hound chatted me up about limited benefit medical plans. But I wasn't so out of it to not recognize early on in the conversation that this cat had an agenda. And it broke down something like this:

“Limited benefit plans are shoddy financial instruments peddled by a bunch of Glengary Glen Ross knockoffs. We want to bust them. Will you help us?”

This interior dialogue also hinted at the realization that this guy—and by extension anyone you might consider a member of the mainstream media—really doesn't have an idea what products like these are about, let alone the people who sell them.

I spent nearly half an hour explaining to him what (and who) these plans were for and who my audience was .And I even ended up educating him about PPACA—as much as I could in a single phone call.

In short, I did my best to set him straight, but he's just one guy. There are so many more people out there walking around with the same misconceptions about everything we do. Hell, I spent my first year on this job not just learning about this business, but unlearning a lot about misguided conventional wisdom.

I hung up thinking what a stark reminder this was of the uphill battle we all face every day. We might have a better chance if we fought it together.

“… I do want to clarify why our numbers are different from AHIPs. The AHIP number includes people who are HSA eligible. It means they have a health plan with the minimum deductible and statutory out-of-pocket maximum, but they haven't opened an account. This happens a lot in the individual market where there is no employer to put money into the account, and it also happens in the employer market when employers don't put money in the account.

“Second, and of greater importance, the number of accounts is different than the number of people covered by an HSA-eligible health plan. If my family of four had an HSA, four people would be counted as having HSA coverage, but there would be only one account for the family. The one broker you quoted who said the 'numbers seem off' should know that.

“In all fairness, EBRI estimates of the combined HRA and HSA market is 21 million in 2011. I do agree HRAs and HSAs are different (vastly different in my opinion) but we are unable at this time to separate them in our survey.  We hope to address that in future work.”