>>I think you confuse insurance with solidarity, with good reason - both are strategies against risk. The difference being that insurance is a business (which likes its investors more than it likes its customers, so profits come first... see New Orleans 2005)

Suggest you Google "ACC NZ." The gist is that ACC is a government administered, no fault accidental injury insurance scheme that covers anybody in NZ, including visitors, who suffers accidental injury. Surpluses are directed not to fat dividends for the fortunate few but to competent underwriting or reduction in future premiums as happened this year.

There's no reason- none- why insurance cannot be successfully administered by government. I'd also point to the Australian government-administered pension scheme: I like to tell US citizens (though they often disbelieve) that had the US decided in the 1980s to administer their Social Security system like the Aussie scheme, the SS fund now would have up to $200T in real assets whose availability would have made the banking crisis chump change and offers a potential out for the $47T Medicare deficit as well. Instead the fund is due to run out of cash before some here will get their turn to draw a pension. These are decisions made possible by politicians, not bureaucrats, and voters cannot shirk responsibility for the politicians they elected and kept in office.

>>And the solidarity is something among equals.

Part of solidarity is that while we are all equal before God or the law or whatever pushes your button, in real life people are blessed with different skills and abilities that society can draw upon and value appropriately. So the porter accepts that the physician receives and deserves a bigger share of society's economic power. Similarly, physicians accept that with great wealth comes great responsibility for more than just themselves. So physicians make house calls to elderly ladies who they know cannot pay for service and cheerfully answer calls in the night because a child struggles to breathe. This solidarity begins to fail if one group systematically draws money to itself in exchange for very little of value to society, or (for example) grasps a one-off bumper profit by offshoring jobs that used to keep fellow citizens occupied. Remove job opportunities and purpose and you're setting up society to fail IMHO. Seems strange that 1%ers and others who are so proud of their cleverness and prowess, cannot see this elephant in the room.