Wrong, there's still a large part of the population who will end up dying of what we call "natural causes" such as Heart attacks and stuff like that. These are very inexpensive, because you don't see them coming, usually. So, no, not everyone on Earth dies from Cancer.
So, yeah, you might be lucky enough to unexpectedly drop dead before some other scourge takes you
However if you don't happen to fortune into a sudden unexpected death, your body will inevitably decay to the point that you will become a large financial and emotional burden on someone. (Or die homeless and friendless). But we can't take care of those people, cuz socialism! They should have had the common courtesy to just hurry up and die.
I'm not arguing probabilities here, I'm arguing deductive reasoning. You are a decaying meatsack. So am I. At some point something very bad will happen to that decaying meatsack. Such an event will be absurdly expensive to treat. Since I think we'd all agree that for pretty much anyone it makes sense to have health insurance, the obvious next step is: just give everyone health insurance and take it out of tax, and simplify these things 1000 fold. (Not to mention that a single payer would have WAY more leverage, and thusly could negotiate way lower prices. And that's not a hypothetical.. that's how it works in pretty much every country that isn't the US).
His/her argument is, AFAICT: "Because insurance companies can profit, that shows that less than a majority of people die after a prolonged, expensive illness.
Therefore the earlier statement that "it is 100% certain you will have a long, expensive illness at some point in life" is not true.
Plenty of people die of sudden stroke or heart attack in their 70s after a relatively healthy life up to that point.
The lowest hanging fruit, biggest bang for the buck, best ROI, the most logical common sense way to control US healthcare costs is to switch to single payer with universal coverage.
Sure, do all the other kabuki, like quality of care, healthcare insurance exchanges, price transparency, generics, whatever. Because better is better. But know that you're weeding the flower beds while the house is burning down.
They wouldn't have that ability in a European like country sponsored insurance since everything would be covered.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/why-an-mri...
You may be thinking "OK, the system is not great but I'm fine because I've got a good insurance", but that's not true. Even with a good insurance you're getting ripped off before of the cost before insurance of healthcare.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_poverty#Cardiovasc...
Oh nice, they should put that on the brochure.