Tune-ups and oil changes are related to car maintenance. People buy auto insurance to covers disasters to themselves and others (and small accidents like fender-benders).

The main reasons people buy health insurance is in case they get sick. That health insurance should also cover the cost of check-ups has a reasonable separate justification — by encouraging people to get check-ups, insurance companies can reduce future outlays (to say nothing of there being social benefits of a healthier populace).

The high-cost medicines are exactly for sick people. So insurance is not performing the service its purchasers intended. The mere privilege of paying for insurance is not what people believe they are buying.

But so depressing as a comparator to the healthcare model. Sigh.

Strange, I always thought the purpose of insurance was, like any other industry, to provide a service people wanted and were willing to pay for.

It’s precisely the fact that we have moved from true insurance to cost insulation — combined with a schizophrenic (and hardly “free market”) tax code that was intended to be a temporary facet of wage & price controls dating back to WWII — that is contributing to the financing dilemma.

Would you suggest that auto insurance is somehow “unfair” because it doesn’t include tune-ups and oil changes (not to mention gas and tolls)? Or because different policyholders pay different premiums for different cars or driving records?

If not, then your position on health insurance is simply indefensible as a matter of basic logic, let alone economics or political philosophy.