&gt;Instead, both healthy and sick patients simply used way less health care.<p>&gt;This raises a scary possibility: Perhaps higher deductibles don&#x27;t lead to smarter shoppers but rather, in the long run, sicker patients.<p>Spot the leap. The author implicitly assumes health care usage&#x2F;health care spending is correlated to health care outcomes, but there is _highly_ convincing evidence that that is not the case. So: has Sarah Kliff (senior editor, &quot;Writing about health care.&quot;) never heard of the Oregon Medicaid health experiment, or is she just pretending it never happened?<p>Also the impossibility of price-shopping is obviously a huge problem.