Here’s a puzzle: Why does health insurance work so differently from every other kind of insurance?
Your car insurance doesn’t pay for oil changes.
Your homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover paint.
Insurance is supposed to protect against catastrophic, unpredictable costs.
But we’ve built a system where insurance pays for everything, routine visits, predictable care, all of it.
This divorces the consumer from the cost. Nobody asks what anything costs because nobody directly pays.
The result?
Premiums rise.
Deductibles rise.
Coverage narrows.
We’ve turned insurance into a wildly inefficient payment system.
What if we returned to actual insurance, catastrophic coverage, and let people pay directly for routine care?
Suddenly doctors and health systems would compete on price.
Patients would shop around.
We’d see the same price drops we see everywhere else competition exists.