I've always had this same objection. I prefer to think of it as a "health plan" rather than "insurance". You can't "insure" someone's health (well, ok, you can, but it's a case of "I don't think this word means what you think it means"). You can merely create a structure where people pool their money on a large enough scale such that it's affordable to fix a person when they break in most (if not all) of the myriad ways they can break.
That's similar to insurance in some ways, but isn't in one crucial way: you generally don't know the "repair" cost up-front; the repair is done, and then you get the bill. If you insure your car against damage up to $50k, you get an estimate when it gets damaged, and ask the insurance company for approval for that amount before the work is done. If the insurance company disagrees on cost, you can find another auto shop that agrees with the insurance company's cost, choose to bear the difference in cost yourself, or decide to forego the repair entirely. You can't do any of that when it comes to healthcare.
> The cost to repair you in our current system could also be infinite, given the numerous and terrible things that can happen to a person with literally no fault of their own. By the same token, the odds of you needing that payout are also damn near incalculable; every place you go, every activity you engage in from skydiving to eating turtle soup in Mexico all have a probability of killing you.
This isn't entirely true though, or, rather, it doesn't matter. Health "insurance" companies have a ton of data that allows them to predict pretty well how much it will cost to fix people when they break, in the ways that they usually break. They collect premiums based on that data and are doing a pretty decent job of not going bankrupt while actually fixing people, even outliers who fall outside of the "usually break" range. (Yes, I know, that's certainly debatable; they're dicks and deny coverage for things they should absolutely cover, and that helps with their bottom line; in principle, however they can afford to cover everything that medical science can perform and still stay afloat.)
> Then hospitals must be instructed to destroy their chargemasters and go back to charging for services at reasonable rates. After that, everything else should more or less be solved.
The problem here is that "reasonable" means different things to different people, and for some procedures, even if the price were dropped down to "at cost" (if that's even a calculable thing), you'd still have people who couldn't afford it. Health care itself isn't free. It costs money to develop medicines. It costs money to train doctors. Those doctors, once trained, need to make a living. It costs money to run hospitals and private practices. Someone needs to bear this cost.
So you still have the same problem of inherently deciding that the life of a rich person is worth more than the life of a poor person; in some cases the rich person can afford to get healed, while the poor person can't and dies (or lives, but goes into crippling debt or bankruptcy to do so). I agree that healthcare costs in the US are out of control, but even if you fix that problem, you still need some system in place to ensure everyone gets the care they need, regardless of their financial situation. (That is, of course, if you believe health care should be a basic right. If you don't, then we're not going to have a productive discussion.)
I think the concept of a pooled health plan is fine; just payments into it need to be dependent on means, and payments of $0 don't disqualify you from coverage. The person who can't afford to pay into it gets the same treatment that everyone else gets. I don't care how we achieve that, whether it's government-single-payer, or something similar to what we have now, just with price controls and government subsidies/credits for those who are unable to pay.
Absolutely agree that the current corrupt health "insurance" industry needs to go, though.