PNHP’s Senior Health Policy Fellow Don McCanne, M.D. writes a daily health policy update, taking an excerpt or quote from a health care news story or analysis on the Internet and commenting on its significance to the single-payer health care reform movement. My mother forwarded me his posting for June 29th, 2007 (not yet up on the site as of this writing), discussing a paper produced by Health Access on the topic of high deductible insurance plans.
The money quote:

…the high deductible plans would only add more stress to the thin
financial resources of middle-income families and do little to
protect families from significant medical debts of thousands of
dollars. An individual mandate for a high-deductible plan would have
a perverse result of bringing a middle-income family closer to
bankruptcy, not protecting it.

… and that, short and sweet, is why I don’t carry health insurance at this point – the insurance I can afford wouldn’t make any substantive difference with regards to whether I went bankrupt as a result of getting severely ill, and it wouldn’t offer any advantage over simply paying cash on the barrelhead to deal with minor illnesses.