It is undeniable that increasing health insurance premiums is a nationwide problem. If nothing else, the fact that we have now passed a government solution for health care indicates this.

I often hear conservative pundits — I’m sure you’re familiar with the list — rail against government health insurance schemes. Those concerns may be legitimate. But they fail to take into account the fact that the private insurance industry also fails to contain costs.

The insurance industry is a business, concerned with profits like any other. Insurance companies are, in the words of Niall Ferguson, “engaged in trade on their own account.” Insurers use numerical statistics to calculate the certainty of events “based on correct actuarial and financial principles, rather than mercantile gambling.”

Gambling is not profitable. Math, however, can be. Insurers also reinvest their revenues from premiums in a further pursuit of profits.

Ferguson also writes that, “In 1930 the German insurance expert Alfred Manes concisely defined insurance as ‘An economic institution resting on the principle of mutuality, established for the purpose of supplying a fund, the need for which arises from a chance occurrence whose probability can be estimated.'”

Otto von Bismarck instituted a state pension in Germany as a kind of “social insurance legislation.” This was a measure he proposed as “a state-socialist idea!” In addition to the ethical concerns for state insurance, there are practical benefits to it. “State insurance could step in where private insurers feared to tread … State insurance exploited economies of scale.”

But do we really want to insure our health? It is inevitable that we have to make those insurance claims. When we do, our premiums inevitably increase. And in our modern culture, we seem to think that our doctors can fix anything more serious than a runny nose. Now, I don’t have anything against doctors — when they’re useful. I haven’t seen one for an actual medical issue in about eight years.

We visit them all the time, without direct accountability for their costs, only to have them throw powerful antibiotics and drugs at our small-time infections and bodily imperfections and irregularities. In response, our immune system’s ability to fight its own battles is compromised. And, following natural selection, stronger, more resilient strains of viruses and bacteria grow.

And I have to ask, do we really want insurance companies — whole associations of hundreds of people — to be involved with and bureaucratize our quality of life? Or do we want to evaluate with our doctors the necessity of a given procedure and have a more personal relationship with our physicians?

It is a common point made that East and West have different cultural values, the West prizing individualism. But it is this individualism, resulting in trying to cheat the system, that leads to higher premiums. If there is no incentive to restrict use of health insurance, legitimate patients will not feel that their premiums are going to support their doctor visits and medical procedures. Sparing users of medicine will feel, rightly, that their money is going to support those who unnecessarily see doctors for all manner of ailments.

One Chilean economist, as quoted by Ferguson, wrote that “‘Social programmes have to include some incentive for individual effort and for persons gradually to be responsible for their own destiny. There is nothing more pathetic than social programmes that encourage social parasitism.'”

Insurance in general should not be the way to pay for health care. While it is necessary that doctors be decisive in ordering tests and procedures for their patients, as lives may depend on it, it is also necessary to evaluate the necessity of such procedures. My health is between me and my health provider — some group of other people into which I buy should not factor into my personal welfare. Insurance is very much, in a way, voluntary socialism.

Insurance agencies distribute risks among many individuals, and when one member is hurt, everyone has to pay.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”