> Overall though, health care should not be tied to your employment. Yes, I agree. > So you're paying for most normal medical expenses out of pocket, and your

> Overall though, health care should not be tied to your employment. Yes, I agree. > So you'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. That'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. Economically and financially, "insurance" is explicitly not 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 "insurance", because it's not. You wouldn't expect your collision insurance to cover your annual DMV fees. If you want normal, routine medical expenses to be priced below cost, then you'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. To be honest, it's perfectly fine to advocate that if that's what you really want, but it's misleading to call this "insurance", because it serves a completely different goal (wealth transfer vs. risk pooling).