Insurance is fundamentally a gamble. When I insure my car, I give the insurance company my money and I bet that an accident will happen that will damage my car. The insurance company bets that nothing will happen. If I win, the insurance company pays. If I lose, I pay, in that I have paid my premiums and I have never gotten any money back.

This works with a car or a house or a diamond ring because not every one of those items is damaged or stolen. Many drivers do not have accidents. So insurance companies can make this bet and win often enough to make a somewhat honest profit, if you think that money made gambling can be honest.

But everyone gets sick and everyone dies. There are no exceptions. It is a definition of life in a human body. The condition is one hundred percent fatal.

So it is not possible for health care companies operating on the insurance model to make an honest profit. They can only make money by denying health care to people when they need it. Since part of the gamble is that if I win (that is, I get sick), the company pays (because they lost the bet), then the insurance companies’ profit is not honest. The entire structure is built on a lie, that the insurance company will pay, and a massive societal self-deception, that maybe I will not get sick and die.

So it is not just that making a profit from caring for the sick, the old, and the dying is immoral.  That point could be argued by well-meaning people and often is. But the Insurance Gamble model is completely dysfunctional. It makes money because people who are sick, old, and dying are routinely denied care. They are denied care directly, by companies refusing to pay, and they are denied care indirectly, by companies making the process so difficult that the sick person, who is not in a state to be able to deal with it, gives up. This is not accidental, it is deliberate; and it is not morally acceptable.

Both of the two foundations of this mess, the outright lie and the self-deception, need to be addressed. We are facing a massive financial train wreck. We are also facing a loss of our common humanity if we are forced to condone some people not being cared for when they are sick. A great deal of Western culture, particularly U.S. culture, is complicit in the situation. Our culture is built on denying the impermanence of human life. From any sane spiritual worldview, the fact that we have allowed ourselves to be backed into the current corner regarding health care is a case in point.