this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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Why does the health insurance industry even exist?
That's a question Americans are prevented from having because it would offend Ayn Rand or something.
Those poor corpos won't be able to afford to sex traffic kids without those billions of dollars.
People are very bad at setting aside small amounts of money to save for large purchases. Especially when that purchase is "one day I might get real sick". That is insurance.
But that is also taxes, so we should just pay those and get healthcare for free.
It's also hard to put away like - well I had $330k of surgeries for a spontaneous pneumothorax about 15 years ago - most people will definitely not experience that. I was in my 20s. Who could save that much by then?
So yeah everyone else in the state paid a little more to cover my bills. By the same token, when God gives a 6yo leukemia (his ways are mysterious lol) I pay a little more to cover her treatment. And by the same token, when someone is lucky enough not to be chosen by God for either of these experiences (hallowed be thy name) then he pays a little more for both of us, which is how he buys a society where he doesn't have to watch a bunch of people die because God was having fun that day.
So really let's put the blame where it's due here, and acknowledge that mankind attempts to introduce fairness into a system where the Lord (worship him lest you burn) is playing fast and loose with His children He loves so much.
Insurance isn’t the same as savings though. Insurance is just a bet. The insurance company basically says “Give me $5000 this year and I will cover your health care costs if you ever accrue any this year otherwise I keep the money.” The insurance company just bets that most of their clients won’t put in any claims.
Not to mention most people can never save enough money to cover the cost of a massive healthcare bill if they get into an accident or get cancer.
This is the US version.
Another version is that the insurance is a mutual fund where everyone is polling money that can be used at any time to pay medical bills. This is not what is happening in the US of course but in some countries the model is similar to that.
The administrators of the mutual fund still make a bet that their income (mainly the money they charge members/customers) will meet or exceed the claims they pay out, no? They might not have a profit motive, but that doesn't change the basic economics of needing income to be >= expenses.
That's not insurance, but - funny, I don't know an English word for this concept. Ok - looked it up, there are words like "friendly society" and "mutual aid fund". Literally what you wrote.
Because "value" must be created and extracted, doesn't matter if that means people can't afford insulin
In Australia we have pretty good public health care. IDK what "universal healthcare" is exactly but everyone gets treated for free for most things.
We also have private health insurance. The relationship between the public and private systems is complex but the main difference for most people is wait times.
I know someone with a back injury that causes constant pain, they manage it with prescribed opiates. The problem is it's not life-threatening so they're not a priority for triage. They're about 1 year through a 4 year wait. If they had private insurance they could probably have the surgery in a few months.
Weirdly, they could start a private health insurance policy, serve the 1 year exclusion for pre-existing conditions, and get their back fixed - I don't know them well enough to ask why they don't do that. Anyway.
There's also a problem in my state where the hospital system is getting "clogged up" with people who should be in aged care facilities and so on. If you have a car accident and break your leg, if you don't have private health insurance an ambulance will take you to the nearest public hospital. In some cases there's a queue of ambulances parked up outside. An ER doctor will still come and check on you, just to make sure you're not dying. This wouldn't be a problem if you had private health insurance and were taken to a private hospital.
That said, there's no private hospital within 400km of where I live. I have private health insurance but I can of course still go to the public ER. I don't have anything bad to say about them. They're great really and I've never had to wait an unreasonable amount of time.
That said, the cost is no where near what others are saying it costs in the US. We pay $400 AUD a month for our whole family, but that includes a lot of extra non-hospital stuff like dental and glasses. That works out to about 3% or 4% of an average family income.
It's the same in the UK. There is national healthcare which is what most people go with because it's free (and most people underestimate how infuriating it is sitting in a waiting room for 6 hours) and then there's private healthcare which is what you go with if you want expediency.
A lot of the time if you go with private you end up being tended to by the same medical staff anyway, you're basically just paying to skip the queue.
In America we pay too much for healthcare AND sit in the waiting room for hours
As an American: those are rookie numbers, I've been stuck waiting 6-8 on a bad day to get seen, not even counting the hours it takes to get more than vitals and some iv liquid...
Not trying to one up, I wish we had a system like that here.
We have long wait times too. Even with gold standard health insurance. ER can easily take 6-12 hours, and appointments are scheduled usually weeks to even months out