Consider how health insurance — or any insurance — works. An insurer collects money, or premiums, from each member of a group, or risk pool, in exchange for covering all or part of a specific set of services that members of the group might need. The total amount of premiums must cover the cost of all the covered services that group members need, plus marketing, administration and profit.
When covered services are very expensive, the insurance covering them will also be costly. Rising health care costs from increased usage of GLP-1 drugs and other pharmaceuticals, private equity investment in and consolidation of hospitals and physician practices, and tariff costs and uncertainties all translate to higher premiums.
The answer to this is not to shift costs from employers, insurers and the government to you and me. We’ve tried that and it doesn’t work.
Just insuring sick people also doesn’t work. First, it means that health insurance premiums are extraordinarily expensive, for the reason discussed earlier. Second, you want to catch health problems earlier rather than later. Studies show that uninsured and underinsured people are diagnosed later and have worse health outcomes than insured people.
In fact, nearly everyone actually wants health insurance — even relatively young and healthy people, who signed up for coverage in droves once it became affordable. Your life isn’t like your house or car. When disaster strikes — and it inevitably will, if given enough time — you can’t save your money and buy another body. And if you don’t have good health insurance when disaster strikes, you’ll be out of luck.