Your nuanced plan of paying for things yourself completely falls apart once you or a loved one contracts stage II or higher cancer, suffers life threatening injuries from a car crash or any of a panopoly of unfortunate situations that would completely exceed your ability to self insure.

I am also not impressed with all of these just asking questions it's so complicated asides; there are dozens of existence proofs that demonstrate a diverse set of approaches that more or less solve this problem at the nation level. But that would require a bit of curiosity about how the rest of the world works, I suppose.

The problem with health care/insurance in the US is not because of unanswered economic theories (or lack of half baked econ 101 approaches), rather it's because of hard ideological commitments to maximize rent extraction based on historical contingencies.

Ever wonder why US corporations generally provide health insurance? World War II something something.