Why does this pattern repeat over and over...? Rule by middlemen who become royalty.... otherwise known as system-gamers or basically just crooks.
First some people get together, pool their resources in a group effort, a tribe, a joint stock company, mutual assurance agreements etc... they quickly prove their worth and effectiveness and the idea grows and matures and very quickly spreads widely attracts many more people (and their money/wherewithal) and evolved even better LARGER forms. And eventually power mongers, "nest-featherers" and just plain greedy selfish people end up running them. And by the time that happens it is not about the needs of the people who are the descendants of the original types of people who got together for mutual benefit and more about how these people/marks/sucker/wealth sources can be chained to a cash milking machine.
But its not just corporations and insurance companies...
From the very earliest human organized history, villages turning into towns, towns turning into cities, city states becoming countries; also little cults or local beliefs turning into a big business religion, workers committees becoming larger and expanding into large unions and then federations of unions and like always the fewer hands the oversight or responsibility for MONEY get concentrated into... the sooner the whole original purpose gets turned upside down and perverted.
The labor union movement eventually evolved from a defense of working people into a vehicle large enough to be hijacked and all too often become a Mob racket for skimming union fees. The important thing is to get the collective effort or organization unified and big enough that a money person coup can eventually take place. That is the whole overriding reason to stop private monopolies, prevent too big to fail and other forms of the monster from happening. Interlocking corporate board membership, enablers in government and finance as well as any other associations that become non-answerable to ordinary members and then conspire to perpetuate the new controllers disproportionate wealth and power consolidation. When accountants became CEOs and began to run things the Reagan-Bush-Bush nightmare was inevitable. Who controls the people's money controls the people.
And any political format is just as vulnerable to gangsterism of whatever type from overt barbarian to genteel oligarchy. The original clan chiefs and tribal leaders were close to and responsive to those who invested their respect and faith in them. But as always as more distance from the original beneficiaries of pooled resources as overseen by selected leaders and those leaders the more likely that these individuals or their heirs would get used to the privileges, entitlements and powers and have less reason to be directly responsive to those who depend on them. Respected chiefs are succeeded by feared warlords or distant despots ruling by divine right... and they did not need to pay off or buy representatives of the people so much as just pay off their proxy barons and other enablers. Fleecers of value and wealth from the population by what ever means or under whatever disguise or excuse that works has always been the reality that these middlemen rulers amount to. But they are not the value adders and the inventors or the innovators that deserve status and reward, no these are the ones who hijack the forms and ideas of the actually creative people... Middlemen can and do add value to the process and we need them as well. BUT we don't need the robbers that tend to supplant the useful ones and then game the system to maximize the parasitical possibilities of monopoly gate-keeping in any system. The health insurance racket is just one of many and one that has grabbed too much and gone beyond its host's carrying capacity.
They invent myths and double talk that they even believe themselves to justify whatever elaborate scam they are part of... and it is often a blind generational construct built by many successive tricks, evasions and induced blind spots by many different selfish, self-important people with overlapping related sets of motivations and acquisitiveness. But underlying it all is the bald fact that they are all scam artists of one stripe or another preying on people's trust and ignorance for their own benefit and it all add up to unconscious social suicide.
The only set of solutions to keeping this all too human tendency rule by the greedy at bay is education, eternal vigilance, communication and the outing of greed heads and the newest methods and forms they come up with. Renewal, a refresh, a house cleaning with a dirt detection system that works early and often even against the most determined system gamers.