Health insurance is not like other insurance. As best I know, no other insurance has the feature that an identifiable subset of people will need more than they can reasonably pay in the future. If we somehow knew my house was going to fall down in the next ten years, I couldn't feasibly insure it, and there are people who'll need much more healthcare than my house costs.

Arguably that militates against treating it as insurance as opposed to a straight-up single payer system or Singapore style system (http://theweek.com/articles/684952/republicans-should-blow-e...), but it does mean you can't argue from the success of existing insurance markets.