I do not want health insurance, I want healthcare. The issue seems clear-cut to me; Buy insurance for your car or your home, but not for healthcare. Unlike car or homeowners insurance, you will use and need healthcare on a regular basis, even if nothing bad happens. (Vaccinations, annual check-ups, flu shots, pregnancy, etc.)
We buy insurance to protect us against a "potential" loss, we do not buy car insurance planning to use it, we buy it in case we have an "accident". We know we will use our healthcare even if we never have an accident. In a well-designed healthcare system, much of the cost would be wellness care and prevention.
Insurance is designed to pool resources from a large group to pay for the losses of a small group. Many people pay for auto insurance every month and never collect a cent from their insurance company, because they never suffer a loss. Insurance is a great vehicle for providing protection from catastrophic losses by a small number of people by sharing the risk among a large group.
If car insurance was structured like our healthcare policies, the insurance would pay for oil changes, tire rotations, tune-ups, new mufflers and shock absorbers. And, when our upholstery wore out, our auto policy would, after paying our co-pay and deductable, pay to replace the seat-covers. Auto insurance does not pay for oil changes does it? No, it is "insurance"! It is not for routine maintenance or replacement of worn out parts. You do not buy insurance for things like that do you?
Everyone uses healthcare. You may make the argument that only some of us will get really sick or that some of us will need very little healthcare, and that would be a valid point if we were talking about disease-care, the current practice in this country. Our medical system is designed to intervene when we become ill or injured, but the rest of the world knows that, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Healthcare should focus primarily on maintaining health and preventing disease and disability, instead of treating us after we are diseased or disabled. That is what healthcare reform should mean.
So let us get off this argument about health insurance and concentrate on devising an effective, inclusive, and affordable health care system.