&gt; Overall though, health care should not be tied to your employment.<p>Yes, I agree.<p>&gt; So you&#x27;re paying for most normal medical expenses out of pocket, and your insurance plan is basically a backstop for if you get cancer, have an accident, etc.<p>That&#x27;s literally what insurance is supposed to be: a financial mechanism for smoothing risk. The actuarial price for insurance on routine events will be exactly the same as paying for those routine events directly.<p>Economically and financially, &quot;insurance&quot; is explicitly <i>not</i> supposed to cover predictable, routine costs, because there is no risk associated with them. It is a really terrible and unfortunate misnomer that we call this &quot;insurance&quot;, because it&#x27;s not. You wouldn&#x27;t expect your collision insurance to cover your annual DMV fees.<p>If you want normal, routine medical expenses to be priced below cost, then you&#x27;re talking about a subsidy. But a subsidy is not insurance. Insurance pools money from at-risk parties. A subsidy is a transfer of wealth.<p>To be honest, it&#x27;s perfectly fine to advocate that if that&#x27;s what you really want, but it&#x27;s misleading to call this &quot;insurance&quot;, because it serves a completely different goal (wealth transfer vs. risk pooling).