Sixteen years ago, I was answering the phone for a member services line at Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield. One day, my manager asked me to answer a different phone number. Instead of the PPO plans I had worked with, this phone number dealt with their new high-deductible health plans.

After a brief training session on how these plans worked, I was off and running.

The people who called me on this new line often had plans with deductibles of $5,000 per person or even higher, accompanied by health savings accounts: a tax-advantaged vehicle that allowed them to pay for the full cost of their expenses before they met their deductible. That is, before their insurance paid a penny for their claims.

It didn’t take long for me to see why their employers put them on these plans. It wasn’t to empower them, as promised. It was simply for their employers to save premium costs and transfer the risks onto their employees. Many people didn’t understand how these plans were designed and were shocked that they had to pay the full cost of their doctor visits out of their health savings accounts, assuming they were funded. Failing that, they just had to pay these large bills out of pocket.

This long experiment has objectively failed to keep its promises to bring down healthcare costs. Instead, it has saddled more Americans with medical debt despite those Americans technically being insured. Healthcare costs have continued to rise.

High-deductible health plans are already extremely common in the Healthcare.gov exchanges (particularly the bronze plans), yet premiums even for those plans have continued to skyrocket despite consumers having plenty of skin in the game.

Yet conservatives continue to double down on this failed experiment, simply because they are unwilling to do what it would take to actually solve the problem. That would mean addressing the unusually exorbitant prices for healthcare services, prescription drugs, medical devices, and health insurance itself in the USA compared to other rich countries that provide universal healthcare.