Briefly, since I&#x27;m on mobile, I&#x27;ll explain why I think you&#x27;re completely wrong.<p>Insurance doesn&#x27;t seek to prevent the inevitable. That&#x27;s not why we buy insurance.  We buy insurance to insure against catastrophic risk.  Would you rather flip a coin and lose your house, or flip 10,000 coins where each toss risks $100?<p>Humans are risk averse, and there is plenty to say about the value of risk reduction.  We buy insurance as a trade off: we know we&#x27;re getting skimmed by the salesman, but our preference for reduced volatility means we gladly take a small certain loss instead of a possible huge one.<p>On the other end, insurance sales men don&#x27;t just sit on their obligations.  They swap risk and find complementary risks:  it&#x27;s highly unlikely a hurricane in Florida will happen at the same time as an ice storm in the north east.  Tally up all the insurance salesmen and you&#x27;ll find they all aim to hold a bit of each other&#x27;s risk.  They, just like us, prefer to take a small certain loss than a possible disaster.<p>This is the purpose of insurance: to dilute the &#x27;pain&#x27; of singularly disasterous events across a large enough population so we collectively do better off.<p>Health insurance is supposed to be the same way: you shouldn&#x27;t need insurance for buying aspirin at Walgreens.  $5 ain&#x27;t gonna kill you.  What will seriously damage you is an unforeseen large medical expense.  As it stands, most people don&#x27;t really need much in the way of serious medical care- it&#x27;s true to say that a small population of people incur far higher medical expenses than the rest of society.  This is exactly the purpose insurance was designed to deal with.<p>I leave my discussion here.  I recognize that there is something deeply unfair about leaving a population out in the cold.  I agree, we ought to do something for them, but this is not a critique of our social policies at large.  I mean to simply remark that insurance is exactly the financial vehicle that best serves to smooth out the consequences of unlikely yet expensive occurrences.