Hello Buckeye - please could you elaborate a bit on this point, maybe by providing a couple of examples ? I am not sure I understand what you mean. Thank you.
My recommendation to check out a HDHP comes after a little probing about health status because the person must be able to purchase individual health insurance.
To answer your question (if I understood it correctly) - Based on comments I've prevously heard at work during open enrollment, employees focus heavily on the annual deductible of the health insurance options presented versus the total cost of their health insurance. That made sense when employees paid 0% of the policy premium but that's changing, even at megacorps.
At my previous job (final job?) at megacorp, for 2011 employees were responsible for 25% of the annual cost of the company's cost of their health insurance policy. I didn't find anyone who had analyzed the total cost of the HDHP (25% of lowest premium of the policy options, significant company contribution to HSA, higher deductible, equal copay after deductible) versus the "regular" insurance (25% of higher premium, no company contribution to HSA, lower deductible, equal copay after deductible). People immediately threw out the HDHP/HSA option because of the $1,500/$3,000 deductible or ignored it because they didn't understand how it worked.
People are also not doing these calculations to determine if they can afford individual insurance if they decide to quit working. HDHP's and their possible cost effectiveness are not even on folk's radar. If I hadn't done the HDHP analysis and had stuck to "regular" insurance options, I would still need to work.
For example, our current policy has an annual deductible of $11,900, 0% coinsurance and our monthly premiums are $339. If instead I purchased a plan with a $1000 annual deductible and 0% coinsurance our premium would be $1565 from United Healthcare (ran a scenario on ehealthinsurance). By self-insuring for the $11,900 deductible, our premiums are $1226 less per month ($14,712 annually). Because we are low consumers of healthcare and we have adequate financial reserves, this trade-off makes sense for us.
We chose such a high deductible because we currently have access to the VA which reduces our risk of having to pay the entire deductible. We also carry $100k medpay on our auto insurance since so many serious injuries come from car accidents. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is another aspect of risk reduction and my husband is only a few years away from Medicare.
There can be a lot of moving parts to analyze at but it seems many people don't get beyond.........."Your deductible is HOW much?"
Did I answer your question?