Health insurance in the US, and other countries, is pretty far from traditional insurance markets where you pay a small amount of money to cover rare, catastrophic events (like your house burning down, or an earthquake).
The name might be similar, but the products actually function very differently. Health insurance in many countries covers routine, predictable "losses" like primary care for strep throat as well as long-term "losses" like prescription medication.
A lot of this is because a traditional insurance model isn't palatable when it comes to healthcare. You can't really employ price or service discrimination against high-risk people with preexisting conditions, like you can with auto insuring a Ferrari, or home insuring a coastal house in a hurricane zone.
Not to mention life insurance! You can't just look assume things work the same way because they have similar names.
Many people don’t understand that insurance companies only make an 8-12% margin. Since each state requires all insurance companies to gain pricing approval to sell in their state (Filings), if healthcare costs go up within a given year the insurance company loses money. We don’t have an insurance issue, we have a healthcare and inflation cost issue. Same goes with home insurance.
What many don’t know: if you don’t like your insurance cost, it’s because of state legislation and cost in YOUR state - not federal govt.
"We don’t have an insurance issue, we have a healthcare and inflation cost issue. Same goes with home insurance."
I think this is the primary driver. However, we can't ignore how insurance company behavior also influences the pricing. The feds play a bigger role in this than you might think with things like Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement rates and residency funding leading to provider scarcity.
