>>>It always seemed equivalent to getting barber insurance.
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>In fact the US model is over-inclusive in many respects - as if your home insurance included the cost of maintenance.
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>My anecdote is a cheerful fellow who showed me his health insurance calculation. If he had no big claims, he'd access preventive care to its full extent- check ups, dental, as much as possible with a really good year being one in which he consumed more than he contributed. I did not try to explain why the best and cheapest insurance policy is one people rarely claim against- sort of like fire insurance.

Embolded totally true. Problem is, to my best mathmatical models the probability of fire consuming a house is not only to a degree lower than death happening to a living person in the future. One of the slight-of-hands figures of speech is to equate/subsumize both under the term "insurance"