Why Does Everyone Need Health Insurance? 
I am answering this question as a consumer , and as someone who is concerned about the state of our country . I sell life insurance for a living , but am very familiar with how the health insurance marketplace works . I think that everybody does need health insurance , but that everybody shouldnt need health insurance . At least not the way we provide it these days . In our current healthcare delivery system , the cost of services is extremely high . Too high , in many cases . There are probably a variety of reasons for this : greed ; cost inefficiencies ; a litigious legal environment ; burdensome government compliance ; etc. . This is not to say that we do not deliver superior services . People from the world over come here to get the best of care . But we pay an arm and a leg for it , and we shouldnt have to . This has made medical insurance the lesser of two evils . Better to have expensive coverage to minimize your out-of-pocket costs , than to go bankrupt or kill your credit record with huge outstanding debt . Or to have too many people exploit the willingness of healthcare providers to provide free service to the needy , and force the rest of us to subsidize their care . But the price of that coverage is often ridiculously high . And too often , we pay for benefits that we never will need . In the best of all worlds , we would optimize the risk-sharing between the individual consumer and the system . Benefit plans would be tailor-made to the greatest extent possible . Young , healthy guys should be able to buy bare-bones catastrophic coverage . Women of childbearing age could have more comprehensive coverage . And on and on . The last thing you want is for politics to dictate benefits according to the agenda of special interest interest groups . One size does not fit all , and it makes the vast majority of us overpay for services we will never use . This is why I am a huge supporter of alternative self-insurance organizations and healing centers . Health insurance is not one of the basic needs of life , contrary to what many politicians will tell you . 