Sigh. How many ways can I put this? Having health insurance is a necessity if I don't want to continually be one bad day away from bankruptcy. The unit cost

Sigh. How many ways can I put this? Having health insurance is a necessity if I don't want to continually be one bad day away from bankruptcy. The unit cost of insuring a person has increased 15% a year all decade. If "much of what it pays for" isn't a necessity then that's just more evidence of how broken the system is. Your high deductible approach is one way to tackle the problem however it has the problem of disincentivizong preventative care, so we might get a lot more 20k emergency room trips instead of 300$ physicals -- and have a less healthy population, to boot. But it might also be a component of a plan that worked. I'd note that "most capitalistic" does not always mean "most effective" -- just usually, for normal markets. Otherwise we'd all take capitalist cabs to work every day instead of the socialist subway :)