<i>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.</i><p>The problem as I see it is that insurers swap and reinsure risk based on classifying the customers into various tranches.  If I have a lot of accidents and tickets, I&#x27;ll pay more for car insurance.  I can expect the same fate if I buy a Corvette rather than a Civic.  If my house has a thatched roof, I might have to pay more for fire insurance.  If I live in Florida, I might pay more for flood insurance but less for earthquake insurance.  If I smoke, I&#x27;ll need to pay more for term life coverage.  But my <i>health</i> expenses are correlated to nothing so much as my age.  There&#x27;s not that much I can do to change that.  I can buy a different car, or a different house, or move to a different state, but no matter how healthy I strive to be, my last year of life is virtually certain to be more expensive than any other.  Very possibly more expensive than all of the other years combined.<p>My mother had great insurance, thanks to her civil-service career back in the 1950s and 1960s... and in the three weeks leading up to her death (of old age, more or less) in the 1990s, the medical bills probably consumed half the economic value she contributed during her lifetime.  That was not a &quot;risk&quot;... it was practically a certainty.  In the absence of a sudden cause of death.  I&#x27;ll probably experience the same thing, and you probably will too.<p>So if &quot;insurance&quot; is just code for time-shifting the payments that the healthcare industry will eventually demand from almost all of us -- which it is -- how can that be the right economic model? It doesn&#x27;t work <i>anything</i> like <i>any</i> other form of insurance.  It might not be a racket, but it&#x27;s also not a free market.