> I would say anything that discourages people from getting basic preventative care is a bad thing even if in your strange world HDHP is somehow closer to 'real

> I would say anything that discourages people from getting basic preventative care is a bad thing even if in your strange world HDHP is somehow closer to 'real' health insurance. Does it discourage that? You still want to get preventative care, because if you don't, you'll have to pay more later. Secondly, people are still strongly disincentivized to become sick because of the way that being sick feels. > HDHPs as I mentioned encourage people to bet against their own health, that they will never get in an accident, or their body won't decide to crap out on them and so forth. Additionally they defeat the entire purpose of insurance which is that the people at risk are subsidized by the healthier people; if you separate the two pools then the healthy pay marginally less while the unhealthy pay a lot more. Who said anything about separating pools? > For example, would you consider HDHPs that don't cover vaccines to be a good or a bad thing? It's a routine checkup, yet we've established that in general it's of greater benefit to society if we do get those routine checkups done. Vaccines are cheap and plentiful. We already require kids to be vaccinated before they can attend school. I'm not sure why insuring them would increase or decrease their rates.