Consumers and businesses remain wary of high-deductible and "consumer-driven" health care plans, which have been available since 2001 and marketed as a way for businesses to reduce their own health care expenses, according to a regional survey released today.

Cowden Associates' annual employee benefits survey reports that enrollment in such plans, and the availability of the plans, increased over last year -- today, 8.8 percent of survey participants offered employees high-deductible plans, up from 2.5 percent in last year's survey.

That's a big increase, but the market for such plans is peaking, or at least appears to be, said Cowden Executive Vice President Vince Wolf. Of employers who don't offer such plans, 84 percent said they "are not likely" to or "have no interest" in offering them in the future.

He said it was because high-deductible plans lead to unhappy employees.

"The dissatisfaction level was the real eye-opener in that," he said.

Cowden's survey -- which tracked companies in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia -- dovetailed with results from a March report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute and the liberally minded Commonwealth Fund, which said more than half of enrollees in a high-deductible plan were unhappy with the out-of-pocket costs.

They aren't dissatisfied with the care they're getting -- just how much it costs them.

"The out-of-pocket component is really where the dissatisfaction lies …. I think employers are really picking up on that," Mr. Wolf said.

The Cowden survey also showed that health care costs continued to increase, though not at the precipitous double-digit level that was customary in the 1990s and earlier this decade.

Regionally, health care costs were 5.7 percent higher for employers than was reported in the 2007 survey.

The most common health care plan remains the PPO, the preferred provider organization, at 76.3 percent of offered plans, up from last year.

The point-of-service plan, POS, now makes up 6.9 percent of all plans offered by the 274 poll respondents, down from 31 percent in the 2004-05 survey year.

As is the case nationally, the number of employers picking up the full health-care premium for employees continues to drop, from 24.8 percent to 17.6 percent for individuals and 19.4 percent to 11.8 for family plans.