Premiums are the part you are shown. The out-of-pocket maximum is the part that decides it. This works out both, for a healthy year and a bad one.
A premium is only part of the price. What decides the winner is the premium plus what you pay when you actually use the plan — and that changes completely between a healthy year and a bad one.
| Plan | A healthy year | The year you expect | A bad year |
|---|
Simplified on purpose: it charges you the smaller of your spending and your deductible, then treats a bad year as hitting the out-of-pocket maximum, and takes any employer HSA money back off. Real plans add coinsurance bands, separate drug tiers and family-versus-individual limits. The full spreadsheet handles those.
Usually, but not always. The premium saving has to be bigger than the extra you pay before the deductible is met. Put your own numbers in above and the table shows you the crossover.
Yes. Money your employer puts into your HSA is money you do not have to find yourself, so it lowers the true cost of that plan. It only applies to HSA-eligible high-deductible plans.
The out-of-pocket maximum. Once you reach it, the plan pays everything else for in-network covered care that year. That is why the 'bad year' column is the number worth comparing.
The calculator above is deliberately simple. The full spreadsheet does the whole job — every plan side by side, three scenarios, and the employer HSA money counted properly. It opens in Excel and works just as well in free Google Sheets.
Get the full Health Plan Comparison spreadsheet Or start with our free Mini Budget Tracker