Yes because insurance is instutionalized by for profit organizations that do not care about well beeing of those that buy insurance.
Where church, family can be more down to earth and driven by moral obligations towards person that needs help.
That is how I seen stuff working in asian societies, if you are not helping your fellows you quickly find out that no one will help you. Where for profit institution has all incentives to not help or help as little as they are obliged. They also can spend more on legal help which will protect them from spending. Predatory insurance companies are not insuring people who are likely to get sick. Family or church will provide help despite they know that person will have expensive treatment.
Sad thing is that more and more people find themselves with no close family, organizations, because of how society in western countries (cities) develops.
World wide there are a large number of mutual organisations (member owned, democratic, member led organisations) that provide insurance. Indeed for a couple of hundred years this was the biggest segment of the insurance industry.
If you don't want to hand over the gains to a private (or publicly) owned insurer then join an insurance mutual, or if one doesn't exist then start one.
You are a little judgmental if you think that no insurance companies care about the welfare of their customers. If an insurance company doesn't care about customers, soon it has none.
GEICO was founded because they though they could provide needed insurance cheaper direct through the mail, rather than through an expensive army of sales-people. They've saved their customers huge amounts of money over the last 60 years (for disclosure, I don't work for or use GEICO, I actually use USAA which is based on same premise).
In church, you have a leader who is milking the flock for an unconscionable amount of tithing, and a bunch of people milking their religious connections to get more business. Of course they will all tell you to help each other out, it's part of how they scam the flock.
And insurance can only work if it's priced according to it's risks. If you have an expensive illness or are likely to get one, it's actually selfish to think that an insurance company will take a massive loss to help you out. If you had purchased medical insurance from the company before you got sick, you'd still be covered and your costs/risks would have been part of a large pool that was correctly priced at the time.
That's the problem with Obamacare, people wanting a free lunch. It destroyed the private insurance market by banning the consideration of prior health conditions, so now only sick people buy Obamacare. Before Obamacare I paid $400 a month for a $5,000 deductible coverage for my family. My first year of the ACA a similar plan cost $1,100 a month, second year $1,300 a month, and this year it's $1,800 a month.
So now my family is on short term insurance and if I get sick it ends after 6 months. Plus I get to pay massive tax penalties for the privilege of having insurance that's not ACA approved. I'd like to go back to my old plan but the ACA banned it.
>> That's the problem with Obamacare, people wanting a free lunch. It destroyed the private insurance market by banning the consideration of prior health conditions, so now only sick people buy Obamacare.
This isn't true. The incentive of paying penalties is so that young healthy people like me get insurance, so that I can dilute the risk pool for my sicker, fellow citizens.
Insurance companies denying you based off of pre-existing conditions was the status quo because it was profitable (for the insurance companies, not for society at large) to insurance mostly healthy people. However, those sick people still need care, and so they end up at the hospital anyways and in doing so, caused outsized (due to severity) externalized costs (that the insurance companies got to avoid by pitting it onto hospitals / government programs).
I notice that everyone who claims the ACA's fundamental premise of getting more people into the insurance pool is flawed also mentions their insurance premiums going up.
The people (companies) getting a free lunch in this country are those who get to externalize the true and total costs of their actions.
Where church, family can be more down to earth and driven by moral obligations towards person that needs help.
That is how I seen stuff working in asian societies, if you are not helping your fellows you quickly find out that no one will help you. Where for profit institution has all incentives to not help or help as little as they are obliged. They also can spend more on legal help which will protect them from spending. Predatory insurance companies are not insuring people who are likely to get sick. Family or church will provide help despite they know that person will have expensive treatment.
Sad thing is that more and more people find themselves with no close family, organizations, because of how society in western countries (cities) develops.