Is Modern "Health Insurance" Even Insurance Anymore?

Let’s be honest about what insurance is supposed to be.

Take car insurance. When your car needs an oil change, new tires, brake pads, or a replacement alternator, you generally pay for it yourself. Routine maintenance and predictable repairs are your responsibility.

The actual insurance is there for the expenses you could never reasonably absorb on your own—totaling your car in a major collision, seriously injuring someone, or being sued after an accident.

Health insurance, as it operates today, is nothing like that.

Rather than serving primarily as protection against catastrophic medical bills, it has become an enormously expensive and heavily managed prepayment plan. It is expected to cover routine appointments, minor illnesses, maintenance medications, preventive care, and countless other everyday expenses.

Now imagine if your auto insurance covered oil changes and windshield wipers—but required your mechanic to obtain prior authorization from a desk jockey three towns away before replacing your transmission.

You would immediately recognize that the system was absurd.

Yet that is essentially how American healthcare works. A third-party payer is inserted into nearly every transaction, from a routine office visit to a maintenance inhaler. Doctors and hospitals must employ armies of billing specialists, medical coders, insurance negotiators, and prior-authorization experts just to get paid for providing care.

Insurance companies then employ their own armies of workers to review, delay, approve, or deny those claims.

Every layer adds cost. Every layer adds friction. And eventually, patients pay for all of it through higher premiums, larger deductibles, copays, coinsurance, and medical bills.

Yes, healthcare has other cost problems too: outrageous hospital prices, expensive medications, and massive healthcare systems with little competition. But forcing nearly every healthcare dollar through an enormous administrative bureaucracy makes all of those problems worse.

The irony is that people can pay thousands of dollars a year for health insurance and still be unable to afford to use it. They pay the premium, then face a deductible so high that routine care remains effectively out of reach. If they do need treatment, they may still have to fight the insurer for permission to receive it.

That is not how genuine insurance is supposed to work.

Real insurance pools risk so that nobody is financially destroyed by cancer, a heart attack, a serious accident, or another medical catastrophe. Routine and predictable care should be transparent, competitively priced, and affordable enough to purchase without navigating a maze of claims and approvals.

Instead, we have created a prepayment plan wrapped in red tape—one that tries to manage every doctor visit and prescription while making protection against genuine catastrophe increasingly unaffordable.

And patients are footing the bill for the entire machine.