Hear me out on this, please.
Let’s say that I spend $5k on health insurance in a year, but don’t go to the doctor or have any medical issues in that year. Where does my money go? It disappears. I basically just gave away my money, and received nothing in return. However, if I took that $5k and simply put it into a personal savings account instead of giving it away to a health insurance provider - that money stays right there if and whenever I decide to use it. It even collects interest.
I realize that with a health insurance provider, you’re (supposedly) getting discounted rates on medical services - but if your money is just disappearing into thin air if you don’t happen to need those medical services in a given year, are you really saving money? It just seems like a really big scam to me - what am I missing?
Because everything costs more than you think. Having a child without insurance is often over $100,000. Any visit to the ER for an emergency? $25,000 to get in the door and often millions of dollars if you need lots of interventions. Heck, even with insurance, chronic conditions often cost thousands of dollars per year. Even simple procedures like my daughter’s tympanostomy tubes have self-pay prices in the tens of thousands of dollars.
You may have conflated ‘costs’ with ‘profit’ - countries with actual healthcare don’t allow providers to inflate their costs like the USA does.