Before you go thinking about how this applies to healthcare... health insurance in the U.S. is different from other types of insurance and personally I think we'd all be better off it were not even called "insurance."
Health insurance is a mix of pre-paying for predictable and certain expenses with tax-free dollars, a transfer/entitlement system to ensure that more people can afford insurance (by design, your premium does not match your expected risk--either you are pooled with others at your employer, or your exchange account is subject to rating band requirements which means, for example, that in many states old people can only be charged 3X more than young people even though old people are likely to be much more than 3x more expensive to insure), and actual insurance. I'm not sure what percentage of your premium reflects the cost of actually insuring you against uncertain future health events, but it's far from 100%.
This is an interesting article, and some of it applies to healthcare in the U.S., but much of it does not.
Health insurance is a mix of pre-paying for predictable and certain expenses with tax-free dollars, a transfer/entitlement system to ensure that more people can afford insurance (by design, your premium does not match your expected risk--either you are pooled with others at your employer, or your exchange account is subject to rating band requirements which means, for example, that in many states old people can only be charged 3X more than young people even though old people are likely to be much more than 3x more expensive to insure), and actual insurance. I'm not sure what percentage of your premium reflects the cost of actually insuring you against uncertain future health events, but it's far from 100%.
This is an interesting article, and some of it applies to healthcare in the U.S., but much of it does not.