Gambling isn't wrong. Gambling is stupid. Hedging risk is not stupid. That's the difference.
Insurance for your phone, computer etc for example is certainly stupid for most people.
But self-insuring for random relatively low-cost events mostly makes little sense for people as it does for companies.
I don't understand why car/home insurance isnt nationalized
If you place a bet where the cost is low enough that it won’t make a qualitative difference to your life, and the possible (not expected) reward is such that it would make a qualitative difference in your life, then you might have maximized the probability of achieving that qualitative difference, despite lowering your expected value. This could be a reasonable strategy.
I don’t gamble but I see why people do it. The toxic element occurs when the reduction in expected wealth does become enough to produce a qualitative QOL change.
This is related to utility I suppose.
Could we say that the “expected” utility of certain gambles is high enough to make them have higher utility than not betting?
No, you have only maximized the probability if you bet all of your money and all of the money you can borrow, beg or steal.
Not if the entertainment value provided is sufficient to compensate for the money lost. Not all benefits are monetary.
But then again you could also argue that those offering the gambling are themselves merely victims of a different addiction cycle involving greed or fear or whatnot
There is no risk in needing to provide healthcare to a population, its a given, though its not always equal cost per person.
However, something like crop insurance allows one to take the up front risk of buying a ton of seed and machines while hedging against the off chance that drought, fire, pest or rain ruins a crop before it can be harvested months later.
More precisely, what is now called "health insurance" in countries like the US is mostly not insurance, because it does not involve costly, rare, unpredictable events, which are the kinds of events that are insurable risks. What should happen is that those kinds of things (for example, insurance against injuries in accidents) should be separate from the provision of predictable health care services, which most health care services are.
What makes health insurance particularly predatory, is the attempt to carve around segments of the population to make money in something that everyone needs.
Almost all accident insurance could be grouped under occupational and transportation related insurance. The remaining accident insurance would be insanely small across almost all segments of any population.
Yes, which makes insurance feasible for such things to the extent that they are rare and unpredictable for particular individuals. (Note that many "large health issues" are not necessarily unpredictable for particular individuals.)
> What makes health insurance particularly predatory, is the attempt to carve around segments of the population to make money in something that everyone needs.
I think the biggest problem is what I said before, that what we call "health insurance" actually includes many things that are not insurance and should not be sold as insurance. If we remove the things that should not be insurance in the first place, I agree that what's left over should be feasible to handle using ordinary insurance practices as is done in other areas.